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

Friedrich Hlderlin: Selected Poems and Fragments, Michael Hamburger, Tr. (New York; 1994) p. Derrida, Jacques, The Politics of Friendship (New York; 2005); p. 36 - 37. Ibid; p. 70.

152 -3.
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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 do something that is more but I dont know what that is. The conversation that ensues is neither of a therapeutic type where 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,

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 to the 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 viability at 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

In 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.

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 of spire 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 us if 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

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, which bound 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 desire not 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 engaged life 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 factors conscious and unconscious that 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

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

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 account that 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 accountmaking 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=MC2 modality: 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
Positive 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.
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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 point is 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

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 of a mindset -- even provisionally, in order to conduct an experiment we 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

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 a process 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 it a 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
These notions are applied in many different ways throughout the two-volume work, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, including, Anti-Oedipus (Minneapolis, MN; 1983) and A 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.
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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 different from 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
The 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 the interruption 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 that do 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
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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 of Capitalism and Schizophrenia cited 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.

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.

AN ASPIRING ASSEMBLAGE. We need to continue to fill in this phantasm we have drawn, that of the aspiring machinic assemblage, for a 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 a potency, 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

I 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.

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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 condition body, 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

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 autoaffecting 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 constantly thrown 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 questions one 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 not settled into either solidified

I 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 my Ethical 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 of onwarding (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.

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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
This, 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 instances of 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.
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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
I have attempted an account of the emergence of this character, even as staging what becomes The Big Bang, in a work I have entitled Ethical Cosmology (Unpublished; available on request). In the spirit and totally inspired by Schellings Ages 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.
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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 of our 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 IS 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.

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. The individuating 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

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 ASPIRING MINDSET. 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 postHegelian/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

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 for as 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.