Rough Notes on Interpotential
Determination is often presented as a mere dichotomy of is and is not, the stagnate barrier between the inner and the outer. But what of the Fuzzy gaze of the inner upon the outer, or the dynamism which survives in feeding this gaze the other which was once forestalled away from it in a merely negative determination? Determination is often divorced from the time in purely negative discourse, which has the privilege of taking by its own right the whole which can be made purely present and divorced from another purely present whole. But real determination occurs in the ordeal of time where pure presence is only obtained in determinationless death. Determination is always determination across the inbetween of a duration in the trial of consciousness, the everyday determination of red for example can only appear across a duration if part of any given experience of (assuming we could have any isolation of a given “experience”) red is “redless” empty space which red can occupy from one time to another such that it can be determined as present across different moments on an arm despite the coat sleeve it appears on moving to a different space from one moment to the next. If a universal which is essential to determination (including determinations as simple as identity or objecthood in time) is not bound by the position of a particulate, and is only intelligible as universal through its movements across particulars in time then part of the very constitution of a universal is the potentiality to subsume different aspects of consciousness than the ones in the (supposedly) immediate present. If this is in any sense the same universal from one moment to the next, then the “could be up” the red of your coat became when it went up from being down in your perspective was already a part of the red of your coat before it became up as it requires this continuity to be itself. This implicit “could be” in any determination of a present thing in consciousness is its continuous capacity to become other to itself which exists alongside it in every flash of duration. This “could be” is not a binary negation, but rather gradations of presence and absence in affirmation of the universal in a moment. Even a total absence of a universal in experience affirms the universal as pure possibility of experience in a given moment, that increases and specifies as it becomes more present. Perhaps instead of thinking of determination then as not being an other, instead think of a determination as being only in its other as an affirmed absence (presence affirmed 0) which is subject to a potential immanent increase from that current position. This seems more accurate to our very experience of objects as just because we determine a chameleon to not be blue does not stop it from becoming such in our experience despite this eternal negative determination we tried to impose on it. This gradational potential oriented approach is also a better account of determination from the standpoint of inter-determination. From a standard negationist account when red is on the coat sleeve we must say the coat sleeve itself is not the red it has, as this would reduce the universal to its accidental manifestation. But then what of the fact this is the very way the universal exists in our experience? Because the red becomes so divorced from its actual incarnation in particular reds and points of red, the pure category of red appears to be a nothingness or absence that bubbles into particulars from no universal original red as seen thing. No given red can be said to have red in its earnest sense which can only be recognized as a pure relation that dissolves it from the constitutive fact it is a color in sight. What then would be the potentiality account of the red? That instead of the red being detached from every experience that incarnates it, part of red’s very capacity is to incarnate as objects in code determination with them as is the capacity of the objects that incarnate as red. This is interpotentiality where what brings forth a universal into presence is in fact its very becoming other to various degrees and the way in which those others become it to various degrees. Thus red is not just a color that is arbitrarily declared to be present on objects, but those object’s very capacity to make red present to various degrees. Since an object can have red to 0 degrees, we can instead account for the movement of things away and toward being red as its own gradation of becoming red given how it interacts with other potentials which are becoming red to various degrees. This seems like a more thorough explanation of universals to me as it also explains their immanent field of interaction and does not refer to a transcendent dualism but instead to an immanent interplay of determinations between each other in various quantitative degrees. Thus instead of saying a given determination is not another, we say in fact it is another but to varying degrees of presence and absence, and the movement of determination is in how these fields of could be determination in a certain almost chemical sense interplay with other determination’s degrees of presence and absence to negotiate another presentation in succeeding durations. Being in essence is interpotential and actuality is the field of determinations that bubble out of this sea of interpotentiality we experience as the simple comingling of elements as they change in time.