Sorry Alison, bit slow this morning as I'm working on something else and I
see everyone else has helpfully jumped in. Still, I'll define the two terms
for which I am responsible:

Rest of you: d'you mind a long response? If so, just junk it.

Eidetic was a term created in 1920 by the psychologist E.R. Jaensch (I have
his interesting book, Eidetic Imagery) and designates an ability to see at
will mental images, especially recent memories, as if they were literally
presented and projected to the mind. Children, especially, may have flashes
of eidetic imagery (my younger daughter Bonny did once, very clearly), but so
do adults who have photographic memory. It's fascinating to compare and
contrast this with dream imagery in its immediacy of appresentation and its
mode of fantasy as opposed to more literal recapture.

Husserl took up the term to represent that aspect of the transcendental ego
that might be intuited as a sort of immanence if you could only conduct a
philosophical purification of the mind -- a discipline closely akin to
mystical exercises -- which would reveal it. Purification involves obliging
the mind not to regard anything as an object, not even the ego itself.
(Perhaps this is why Martin accuses me of looking for immanence -- though I
have carefully problematised -- as the French say -- all such terminology as
transcendence and origin -- and immanence by implication -- and he shouldn't
return to a charge already dealt with as if no further argument were
necessary. I'll come to this.)

The problem with Husserl is that from this intensely interesting sense of the
eidetic (there's no real dispute that eidetic imagery exists), he attempted
to erect the thus purified (transcendental) ego as the source -- origin -- of
our sense of what is true.

Modern science has rendered dubious the very notion of origin: has a quantum
event a point of origin when the event is so chronically undecidable, when
within the so-called event multiple states of existence are supposed by the
mathematics, and when a determined result is only measured after any point
origin for the event that could otherwise have existed? Has the universe a
singular origin when supposing that it does have gives rise to infinities
that fit uncomfortably into the mathematics, so that they have to be factored
out in complicated ways (string theory with its multi-dimensionality,
Hawking-like smoothing out of origin and so on)? In philosophy, has an idea
or an act of mind an origin when -- conceivably -- quantum level events are
at work in the brain to produce the act of mind or when all ideas are
implicated in the whole social world and history of language so that you can
never get at any "root". And so on. My point here was that to attempt
describe "origin" entangles the very notion of origin inside the descriptive
processes and creates inevitable contradictions. You can read that two ways:
the idea of origin is incoherent; or description cannot be powerful enough to
decide the question one way or the other. My preferred reading is the
second. Here I agree with Randolph about the speculative quality of what's
being said about "immanence", etc.

Martin takes the snow road of argument that I'm trying to melt. He is
brandishing at me, like sundry cop IDs, known ideas that have clustered
around avant-gardist attitudes, some of them for decades.

I first acknowledge gratefully that I give no special place to fear among the
various emotions (and also acknowledge my appreciation for Martin's own
poetry); it was an accident of metaphorical field ("ocean") and catchpenny
message title that I may seem to have concentrated on it -- though see below,
on death.

Before I posted my original message I already knew of all the following
phrases or ideas in so many words: "deep is a tired metaphor"; so is
"higher"; they represent a "primary dualism", or a "nostalgia for a fall",
or potential "transcendence". I'm afraid even "bricolage" has become a
cliché, for I've been hearing it regularly for the past six years. In
contrast to taking what I regard as now frozen positions, I am genuinely
conducting meditation to investigate as intensely as possible Husserl's
claims for an eidetic realm: I distinguish this from repetition of existing
concepts as if they were achieved truths.

So let me take Martin's thread somewhere slightly else. "Deep" and "higher"
are not tired metaphors if I use them to investigate the current notion of
language "surface", for "surface", as Martin might have noted, is another
tired metaphor, in fact an even more tired one because it's faddish. "Deep"
or "higher" do not imply nostalgia for a fall or religious style
transcendence: I have been as clear as possible on that point and certainly
reject any nostalgia of that kind. The question is quite different -- how
does meaning arise? Adopting the tired metaphor of surfaces then, to stay on
elaborate flat word surfaces would be fine if every word could be considered
as at exactly the same height, neither a millimetre above or under each
other, but then there are no meanings at all, not even recombinant ones -- if
"bricolage" itself remains possible (which I doubt), it couldn't possibly
yield delight. ("Delight" reintroduces a sense of "higher" than, say,
"depression" or "neutrality" -- it is, dreaded word, "hierarchical" in the
way that Martin uses it. Etymologically, it's linked to food taste, cf
"delicious".)

Well, in another move I've recently seen -- we may rescue meaning by
retaining our sense of surfaces but by adjusting spaces, or movements, or
negotiations, or ruptures between fragments, phonemes, words, blocks of
words, or other meaning units -- competition of discourses, and so on. But
that would merely be to change the spatial metaphor from up-down to across,
and it is difficult to rescue a notion of "rupture" -- the key term -- from
it: for how does that toted abstract term, "desire", or the emotional field
which produces a sense of "rupture" arise? I am unconvinced by the
descriptions of emotion around in this field of argument. If "desire" is
supposedly the motor of this activity, then it is better redefined neutrally
as mere "ongoingness" (as we might suppose -- though I don' necessarily do so
-- an amoeba merely ongoingly splits without even a flicker of "delight").
In my view desire always supposes an object and therefore choices that are
already being made: it is tendentious like that from the moment we use the
term. Can't we retreat to the non-human and see the bricolage as a merely
mechanical activity performed by a human robot? Well, if you can hack it you
can!

I'm deeply suspicious of all philosophies which might set aside millennia of
human mysticism and initiatory disciplines. We're immensely caught up in a
contemporary ideology, that's all. Most especially, if you have any really
shocking and sudden experience of bereavement or have really been at
immediate risk of death, I'm not going to believe you if you still say "deep"
is just a tired metaphor applied to the sensations you exactly feel exactly
then. I have no idea what this says about "dualism", but I refuse to be
frightened off ("fear"!) by any contemporary bogey word from acknowledging
what I have experienced. Questions of monism or dualism are, in my belief,
not finally decidable -- for science to claim to decide them in favour of
monism ("mind and physical process the same thing, essentially") is a form of
bigotry. But I am not a decided dualist either.

I specifically didn't mention Derrida because I actually admire the dense
protection that surrounds all his positions. He's very very difficult to
argue against (would take a book and I'd have to be a professional
philosopher), and I hope I've read him with as much interest as Martin has.
My target was our current thought clichés, some of which arise from poets'
interpretations of Derrida and other philosophers. I just want to get the
thought-field fluid and active again.

Randolph: I don't see any logic in the idea that a relation between an
eidetic vision and form could descend into a realer than thou hierarchy of
forms, and you have slightly misquoted. "Eidetic", as defined above, is
limited to the image of the visual perception, yes, but is a kind of imaging
which is not, as I say, really in doubt: no hierarchy is in question, only
mental affects of a certain putative kind. We don't for example have to worry
about "privileging perception" (a snowed up idea) if we are, in fact,
concentrating on the visual for the moment. There is a proper question
whether an eidetic realm lies behind ordinary memory, blocked from us perhaps
by adult rationalising processes. I incline from my personal meditations to
think Husserl was right to think such a realm does lie there. I am
disinclined to claim that this realm has any special metaphysical status
because I can't know that. If Husserl was right, then form would leave its
mark in the eidetic realm, perhaps unperceived by us. Then we might well
discuss the relation between this and other senses, as Randolph intriguingly
invites us to do, for I certainly agree that form has many different effects
on our senses.

  The subliminal linguistic worlds explored by Prynne (very different
in my view from language as surface or bricolage) point me towards similar
mysteries, though I have not (perhaps yet) been fully convinced by the Stars
and Tigers essay's manner of explicating this field.

Doug


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