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Diremption and ‘Class’

Introductory

Dividing lines. On the use of binary divisions in describing the self - but also as constituting the self, the limits of the self, the world ‘within’: and binary divisions as part of the description of society - the world ‘without’. The former divisions, we note, describing ‘the self’, are reducible only if one ‘side’ is ignored… ‘explained away’ (‘everything’ is either ‘objective’ or ‘subjective’, the view from without, the view from within - is ‘either/or’…). If not, if irreducible, ‘incommensurable’, yet co-implicating, then we must learn to live with diremption in thought – as we do in experience… Of the world ‘outside’, we habitually classify into groups of selves, the grouping of selves, the divisions of society. These divisions, if binary, are not conceptually co-implicating, but based (like sexual difference) upon verifiable facts and differences (landowning/ landless, propertied/ property-less, working/ unemployed) in the case of zero-sum models, or of differing qualities (white collar/blue collar, hand/brain, assorted sexual divisions of labour) – and if not binary, then based upon differences quantifiable (degree of education, wealth, ownership or social position) and resulting in multiple strata or social gradations. Most methods of mapping society use a mixture of the above.

First-off. Diremption. Perhaps the best ‘proof’ of an experiential and rational-conceptual binary divide is… to ‘follow one side and find it leads to the opposite term’… For this is what happens when we follow through on such related terms as, subject/object, subject/other, subjective/objective often amalgamated and glossed as ‘in/out’, or inside/outside points of view – with the latter as ‘finally’ imagined from the inside… (this latter imagining itself a turning of the inside into an object, and so on…). And then continue on in loops, to infinity, to oscillation… (which, in effect, both describes and enacts a process).

So we become aware of the presence of the diremption when … first, we follow one side of the (subject/object type) binary, only to find ourselves on the other… then continue on into a potentially infinite oscillation. An on-going process that is ourselves, our perception and our consciousness… (of objects, others and of self, as object, as other… which complex, while we live and are aware, is ever present, we might call this ‘the Eternal Present’ – for we are all ‘in one’, or ‘are one’… always). We might further say that the moment we recognize the trend to infinity, is the moment of our recognition of the role proper to the diremption. Repetition as the hand rail of the real.

We might say: Always subject (always object)…

So the question. Is the diremption taken as a binary relation (its description as binary, but further conceptualized as a complex of binary terms) due to a language feature, with binaries as part of our (hardwired) neural-linguistic system? Or are our linguistic, logical and conceptual binaries due to our lived diremption? Otherwise put, are the binaries used in the description of the process of knowing due to our lived diremption or to our genetic nature? And can these be distinguished (with one as subjective experience and the other as objective picture or explanation, and again, here we go, moving between the ‘two poles’, perhaps with ‘both /and’ replacing ‘either /or’ as the best way of understanding)? So leaving us with with the diremption as constitutive of both consciousness and its manner of differentiating its mental contents… Which in turn suggests the diremption as the possible origin or model of, or for, these, of how we experience them and how we understand them (as of the basis of the experience of ‘time’ which may then, interestingly, in turn, be read as leading to the terms used in logic… the ‘reason’ we use to understand and describe things)…

So leading to the dependence, to some degree, of all concepts, insofar as founded on oppositional difference, on the diremption. And so all difference, all differential definition: alternatively, we might just feature a part of these differences as cogent; the key differences that involve us, reference back to us, as in class and gender. So showing, in part, reality (the object, reference, empiricism) and, in part, the involvement of the viewer (the subject). With the latter taken together with reason, mathematics, concepts, that is, thought, qualitative and quantitative describers and their relations (object languages)… Which in turn suggests that these (object languages) all function at the behest of a (concrete) subject-ive point of view (until made objective by reference to a concrete object… and made ‘objective’ by reference to more than one subject as witness). ‘Objectivity’, defined this way, is a social product. Produced by agreement which is plural (as well as the learnt names and recognition of things due to our rearing and experience, that is our memory).

A social world often described as divided by two…

Which, in this essay, means as divided by class. But not only ‘class’: but ‘class’ as a binary… Now ‘class’ as gradation or quantitative measure or as a product of qualitative forms of difference, is measurable or testable to some degree (we may measure quantities of wealth or education or other indices, note the division of labour, mental and manual, and the ‘social position’ accorded to the various professions). But these yield a range of differences – which then may be compared with other qualitatively different quantitative ranges, say gender or generation, or culture or religious differences, and including matters of ‘race’ and sexuality (‘time’ too is actually a product of such a comparison of two rhythms or measures, one roughly based on the cycles of nature, one cultural, an imposed abstract measure – similarly with ‘class’ there may be a ‘real’ element or difference, and a cultural overlay, its measure accompanied by attendant culturally specific connotations – generally made up of priority and value). Yet the binary element of many descriptions of a society as divided by class is not about two different qualities, but rather the division of a quantitative scale at some point deemed to be crucial – to be of qualitative significance… So yielding two halves, the line drawn before and after a given quantity of wealth or education… Including a zero degree at the lowest level: as in the definition of a class, by absence – as in ‘the proletariat’ as ‘property-less’, where property is defined as ‘capital’ or capitalisable objects, land, for example… (but also as the negative definition of sex, with one sex read as lacking in a given sexual feature possessed by the other… this latter generally being a qualitative relation on which gender roles are then prescribed). Now whilst the sex/gender difference is usually qualitative, pertaining of two different qualities or ‘primary sexual characteristics’ (unless read in the zero/sum or ‘have or have-not’ model), configured by sexual difference (which, physiologically-speaking, comes in many shape and sizes) and so binary. Yet ‘class difference’ is not (qualitative): and so does not… Is generally made up of a quantitative difference which then produces a binary – a ‘two class’ system (where the quantities in between – as in managerial or worker, share and property ownership, or salary as wage) are left out of the account (a ‘restrictive economy’ of definition, typical of ‘classic’ models). Often foregrounding the ‘extremes’ or poles; two parts then taken as representing the ‘two wholes’. In effect a tautology or nominalism of quantitative origin.

(…but not forgetting that gender, or the social division of the sexes, too may be read as ‘class’ – as a binary model based upon the preference or preferment on one over the other… difference hierarchisised… and the normative ascription of types of labour).

(… or that ‘race’ also implies a violent classification of persons, the positing of a ‘different’ class of person, also thus pushed into a lower or higher class of work depending on which position in a two term hierarchy is held, or ascribed… a simple binarisation that reflects the ‘us’/other divide of the diremption projected and embodied in populations, with all objects/others, all those ‘outside’ now viewed as less than the self and its community of recognition – without the community element here we are left with… the individual as psychopath, constitutionally unaware of ‘otherness’… )

So leaving us with two definitions of class, one binary, the other not… based on the many factors that distinguish and differentiate human social life.

Firstly, dealing with social division as binary, as ‘class’, as the simple reduction of class differentiation to two (Marx and received French models of earlier societies as ‘binary’ in social structure, as class divided… with an inner dynamic bequeathed by this division). This binary, in many respects, may be read as an echo of our inner diremption (subject/object, subject/other, subject as object, subject as other) – as of our tendency to think in binaries, in contraries, in contradictions… in ‘opposites’… So easily sliding from subjective to subjunctive – from inner wish to external ascription. Mental, linguistic, difference, but ‘grounded’ in (or flowing from) our diremption and in our sexed difference (and motivated by our desire). In this sense binary models owe one debt to diremption, another to desire. The dice are always already loaded.

Regarding the objective side of class relations as a mover of society, of the binary model as explaining social dynamics (or indeed any binary as involving an antagonism and resolution), one can only re-state, that the ‘synthesis’ or resolution that so often accompanies this model is religious, redemptive, not empirical – in reality, in contests cultural, social, economic, evolutionary, one side wins (and that‘s that)… Any difference in terms, binary forces, a division and agon, that implies a ‘synthesis’ is anyway at best a metaphysical conceit. Binarisation as simplification as explanation is perhaps one of our least pleasant human characteristics, at least when applied to politics or social division or distinction (read prejudice). Where our desire is the desire for identity (for recognition as well as distinction). ‘Us and them’ of course is directly in debt to the diremption – its generalisation into groups and to recognition rituals (identity exchange and sacrifice).

Regarding class and its role as change… that is, the use of a dynamic definition of class as a means of describing society as development and transformation; this usually involves an ideological choice regarding which difference is the ‘key’ difference or the ideological inference or extension of indicative or objective features into subjunctive or subjective features – from facts to wishes. A good example can be found in the critical writings of Georgy Lukacs, where the description of class dynamics regarding the emergence of modern Germany, as depicted in characters of the literature of the period, is spot on, whilst the attempt to paste the two class dynamic (the ‘bourgeois revolution’ actually a multi-class dynamic, with the key contest being between two elites), to transfer it, simplified, a metaphor, onto the relations of the industrial working class and factory owners, together with other (‘residual’) elites, is misguided, metaphysical and finally in thrall to a reductive economism, and the limits imposed by a redemptive ideology and the cynicism of a Party line…

We might also note that if ‘class’ may be used as indictor –and result- of social dynamics, explanative of ongoing social change, so too can ‘distinction’, or any social difference found or deemed to be significant. As, for example, in the social role of ‘generation’, so important to tribal structure and to modern mass consumer society (post-World War 2) and also found in the impact of gender role change; their effect on the social whole or Public Sphere, or production of culture (popular culture, ‘youth culture’, sub-cultures, ‘women’s films’ and magazines, fashion…) as well the role of sex in employment patterns, pay differentials and the perception of the status of work according to gender weighting…

We might furthermore note the political appropriation or reaction against ‘emergent’ differences, like sex/gender equality, and the use of these as a rallying point for older ‘residual’ forces or traditions… (or racial, cultural, religious, interest groups and their ‘gurus’) as, for example, used for anti-tax reasons… The modern form of the economic ‘class struggle’ where the dominant companies wish to receive subsidy, but pay as little tax as possible… In effect, the ‘struggle’ between ‘Big State’ and ‘Big Capital’… as mediated by representative institutions.

Two examples of the modern use of class analysis as dynamic diagnostic follow… both, incidentally, foregrounding the role or definition of class as according to economics (with both linked to changes due to changes in technology). The first focuses on the role of finance capital, especially in its recent virtual, ’magical’, mathematical form, as negative for society because ‘distracting’ capital and so destabilizing society because not playing its ‘supposed’ distributive or allocatory role ‘placing’ capital where it is required in the economy. Furthermore, this gambling with institutional wealth by a gifted few implies that the talents of these few are being wasted and could be better employed elsewhere… So the sensible (but much contested) preference on national restrictions on finance capital (stocks, insurance as play-for-profit), as taxed and law governed, and the concomitant need for international agreements to prevent this kind of destabilizing gambling and the disasters it may bring (2008). This means pointing to the role of international institutions and international law as a key to future stability and of growth. The same might be argued for the main beneficiaries of the internet communications revolution (a new elite) and its impact on employment (a forerunner of the negative effects of automation and the role of AI in future production and services – with remarkable innovation and ambition together with charity work being offset by tax avoidance, poor pay and conditions and political ‘naivety’).

The second example comes from the class re-differentiation of the ‘old industrial working class’ as a result of the long process of post industrialization: now clearly a process over, but also merging with the new wave of digitally inspired change in the economy (this latter a fresh blow to social and economic stability). A differentiation that included a movement up, from the old working class (‘yuppies’, the explosion of middle management, social and geographic mobility) and a movement down, into a new underclass (and those who feel ‘left behind’) - a particular feature of ‘monopoly’ and oligarchic market societies… (and we further note the parallel international development of oligarchy – as a global effect of global re-differentiation… with its representatives as those professing the most nationalism…). The above process being the prime explanation for the politics of the early 21^st century (exacerbated to be sure by economic recession).

In the early modern epoch, from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century, the representatives of the class structure binarised as ‘bourgeoisie and proletariat’, may well have contributed to the social dynamics of society - including on the one hand the formation of social-democratic labour parties which spearheaded the reforms of the post war period, as well as the passage into a ‘state capitalist’ or ‘neo-feudal’ state-dominated unitary model of society (as a result of the political rejection or failure of market capitalism)… with party and assorted elites using lower middle, working and underclass to stage a coup (where not imposed by war and invasion). But then the same may be said of nationalism and its apotheosis in fascism and world war… Philosophically ‘both’ forms are informed by a reactive Romantic ideology (as their populist avatars are today). Forms of identity (national, class) now augmented and, in times of plenty, attenuated by a third expression of identity or self, one (in its mass cultural form) new and constitutively foundational to modern societies, consumerism (the true basis of mass society and the stability of its institutions, including democracy).

So, as a matter of ‘quantity qualified’, this manner of class binarisation (despite being the product of the thought of the social) is, nevertheless, not the same as the irreducible binary divisions of the diremption that we find in the social sciences or humanities (economics, sociology, anthropology etc): for example, the differences of calculated versus ‘gift’ exchange, of equal exchange versus assertive or unequal exchange - all incommensurable differences that are due to the operation of the diremption repeated throughout human culture. This operation is a division made from the internal division of subject and object, from the difference of the subjective point of view and the objective point of view (but also of subject/object and object as other and so, in turn, potentially as self – and so we begin again…). This difference, the diremption, has a foundational influence on identity – and we accordingly find that all aspects of our identity, including ‘class’ position, are also divided according to the diremption. Class as difference, as distinction, as degree, as position in a pyramidal hierarchy, etc., based upon production, wealth, learning, social position, etc., and all the fine gradations between – including the family and generation as ‘class’ structures (in many cases changes apparently due to, or apportioned to, class, were in fact due to generational difference…). All these potentially objective (empirically verifiable) criteria define subjective identity which is however only manifested in personal experience as ‘belonging’ or felt association (but which may indeed be completely different to the object side description). The same may be said of gender roles and sexed physiology, the first as felt, lived experience (of whatever association) and the second as performing a ‘class-like’ differentiating function; dividing the sexes into normative socio-economic roles, from structural patriarchy- where difference is encoded in law as well as custom, to structural prejudice - where all are equal in law but still prey to residual customs; so not, which gender (legally) dominates the whole: but, which gender dominates what structure or institution in society… (see also sister article, ‘Diremption and Gender’). Either-way the ‘diremptive difference’ runs through and so re-divides all other manner of distinction, all other forms of classification. So again, as with the oscillation found to be infinite taken as a proof of the diremption as constitutive, here again we also find the unavoidability of the diremptive division into two – as well as the alternation between the two, as the reliance of one upon the other, its unsaid, its prior, as well as following, necessity, exerts a gravitational force…

Indeed we may define gender as ‘class’, as distinction and/or position, when ordered into a hierarchy… Included here is an option for reclassification as ‘social difference’. In this case sexual difference (nature, body) leading to social differences, role apportionment and hierarchical placement… (culture, mind). So making it possible to envisage a ‘compound’ class; a social identity formed by a combination of differences and indices: gender, generation, ownership and wealth, type of labour and social position, education and culture (distinction, ‘cultural capital’) ‘race’ and sexuality - as well as other, more personal, chosen identity propositions (‘life-style’).

Once we move away from one simple mode of definition of class, then we are able to map the range of distinctions and difference making methods a society has, from actual differences (labour, possessions, ownership, education, access to culture, position, power), to imaginary ones, (degrees of recognition and ‘hierarchy placing’ according to preferred criteria, ‘ours are the best’, therefore… ‘we are higher’… ‘more deserving’, ‘more entitled’… ‘more important’… etc., etc.,). Now the former is objective, whist the second is identity based, subjective, so again this division leads us to the division proper to the diremption (with our individual ‘take’ on actual differences as their subjective moment, and the examination of our experiential, felt self-identifications as their object-ive moment…).

Secondly, we have difference as source of the dueling pair, contrastive and complimentary, us and them, difference from others as ‘distinction’ together with community as group difference (the former usually taking place within the frame of the later; as with generations within a family or workplace, competitiveness within the peer group). This is also the difference of competition and co-operation. Of competition within and without groups (between groups); the latter form of competition itself requiring co-operation, which fact again does not negate inner differences as a form of competition proper to intra-group relations. Survival, at times, too requires competition… at times co-operation… The human ecology of balance… for survival requires that we know when to use which - and in what combination. Commentators (historians, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists and their political followers) have often erred on either side when it comes to deciding which is more important (as in the State/Market opposition in politics); nowadays, as the result of cumulative research, they are more likely to view human evolution as a combination. Now as competition: now as co-operation. However politics may also proceed to politicise this difference, then to reify it, fix it into a divisive dogma, divorced from all relation to reality (this is perhaps the sign of a politics that will fail the sociality it represents and so imperil its future…).

Distinction as competition may indeed destabilise society (or city, tribe, group, family) if pushed too far (especially if ‘competition’ or ‘distinction’ is a figure for race or religion and prejudice – or just the cover for the ambitions of an individual)… The history of democracies, of representative government, as of self-government and the history of city states, attest only too well to this (the long history of this experiment, the Greek city states, early Rome, late medieval cities to the Renaissance and the Reformation, may be augmented by the short history of capitalism and its trade cycle, featuring the crises of the 1840s, 1870s, 1930s and 2008 on… as economic challenges and unprincipled individuals join forces to exploit class, cultural, and religious differences to the detriment of representative government). Otherwise competition may be a spur to growth and self-motivation… Cooperation, however, is seen as crucial in times of crisis – when we often look to the State to solve problems civil society cannot. But these latter measures may often become a drag on production if overdone; if too bureaucratized, too burdened with options for corruption and inaction (‘gate-keeping’, ‘rent-seeking’ together with lazy or fearful ‘jobs-worth’ refusal of initiative and action). Which in all modern societies it usually is… Also in times of crisis, cooperation, or solidarity, communal ‘sameness’ or belonging (mutual recognition) may not be extended to all, in a divisive from of distinction, an ‘accursed share’ may be designated… a scapegoat found, by means of which the rest may be united… (by means of the sacrifice of which - read, the destruction of which - the rest may be united, and not only through an assumed normative or coerced collective identity, but also by terror, by fear… as we witness what happens to those designated as ‘other’… and cower).

For the idea of ‘the other’ and its exacerbation into a kind of paranoiac, ‘sublime negative’, as ‘the Other’ plays a role equally divisive and uniting: divisive with respect to the division inserted between members of a community separated into those ‘inside’ and those deemed ‘outside’ - effectively a casting out of those ‘othered’; uniting of a community divided, by means of an external enemy, or by some part of itself deemed other… Just how extreme this may become (ranging from a negative press to a full blown pogrom or ‘ethnic cleansing’) depends upon the nature of the group or community and the scale of the situation, and the kind of politics –and politicians- involved (most kinds of politics seems to require an ‘other’ of some sort, those deemed responsible for a given problem, but the most cynical form involves the abjection of an entire community as the Other, as responsible for all ills – including those structural to society or humanity, and so, in effect, constituting a universal scapegoat). But whatever degree of othering involved, it is always identity-based… with a positing (assertion) and recognition of ‘the Same’, of the ‘same interest’, of ‘saming’ as one key to co-operation, the positing of one kind of community as overriding other differences, an overriding which being irrational involves much emotional investment (as in the example of the emotional charge that accompanies the change of old enemies co-operating… an emotional expenditure which changes identity, as Other becomes the Same and enemies become brothers and sisters…). Opposed to all forms of new community however, are their newly minted others; a binary made absolute, metaphysical and superstitious, as ‘the Other’. Classifications are changed and classes united by the assertion of a new binary identity. In effect the everyday oscillation of self and object/other (which implies empathy and recognition) is foreclosed in the case of a specific group (or individual) designated the Other.

Needless to say… this ‘outside-ness’, like all posited outside-ness, not least the Absolute Outside (of, say, ‘eternity’) is made up of our interior, in this case all its negatives, its taboos and bad feelings, resentments, are collected together and projected out onto an-other - just as its opposite, the experience of the sublime Other, gathers all our positive fantasies and projects them, personifies them, as in the presence of a god). Childhood sufferings and parental projections (memory and hyperbole) doubtless play a key role in these, as perhaps in all other (sic) such, associations (whether negative or positive – whether offering demons or gods).

However, diremption as a very different kind of division,’ for the division between the (assertive) identity of the subject, which plays the key role in the comments given above, and the (epistemological) description of the object, is also a part of the social sciences, as of thought and philosophy… (together with the arts, another realm of human culture which is also dirempt). Indeed the subjective-assertive, objective-descriptive difference can be found even in such philosophical conceptual differences as: particular/general; use/mention; fact and value or ‘is’ and ‘ought’. In sociology and anthropology, the diremption most dramatically manifests itself as the clash or combination of gift and commodity types of exchange (or their representation in theory), or of irrational, unequal, assertive, subjective forms of exchange with rational, ‘equal’, objective exchange; the twin realms of ‘identity exchange’ or self-assertion and scientific description. In the arts this difference is simply present as subjective and objective point of view: the latter, ‘Object Right’, governing the representation of hierarchy, priority and power (top left corner, its diagonal, and clockwise in three dimensional space); the former, governing the depiction of narrative (left to right in some cultures, right to left in others, usually echoing script direction… although globalization has accentuated the trend towards the left to right form of script direction and narrative depiction). In the ‘hard’ or physical sciences, this difference is present in the difference of classical field theory (continuous, uniform) and quantum physical (dis-continuous, perspectival, positional) as representing our purported collective objectivity and our ‘subjective’, collective, species point of view - with the latter, surprisingly, winning the empirical battle… (In mathematics too, we may find in Gödel’s Proof, the unequal contest of specially designed ‘restricted’, object languages and the subjective ‘general’ creativity of natural language…).

Here we should note the conceptual role of the social sciences, often by means of the median role of economics, as giving content to the notion of class (or socio-economic classification) and describing the role of the resulting sense of ‘distinction’, of difference… of identity… as objective - as … science (abetted by Structuralism and Functionalism, as well as Marxism, as forms of objectivism). And the ‘return’, over many decades, of the experiential dimension of these… of who we think we are, and the relation of this then to the various definitions of class… our acceptance or rejection of these – often an irrational, emotive, ‘contrarian’ matter.

The object side, self as object, provides the collective, institutional, or ‘objective’ definition or description (often based upon a specialised object language or professional jargon): the subjective side, our experience as individuals (but also generalizable into a collective or community) provides the basis of our belonging, our assertion of self-definition or self-description (they need not be the same). ‘Class’ names these differences… From big, ‘social class’, to small, a ‘touch of class’. But, as noted, as ‘classification’, it also names other differences too, other ways of dividing the social spectrum (gender, generation, culture and ‘race’) and so perhaps a differentiation also as much due to the diremption as constitutive of our subjectivity (with its reliance on linguistic or conceptual binaries), as to the nature of the object – (but then we remember that the diremption also plays a role in constituting the object…)…

Likewise, from the perception of class (or of gender) to the function of this perception (of class or other difference) as its role in society or community (of belonging or recognition as Same) and so to the actual effect of this belief… we again reenact the motion of the diremption from subjective experience to objective description, here with the later as demystifying, scientific, explanatory. Similarly with religion, where subjective belief is generally not objectively verifiable (and, as with other forms of identity assertion, often deliberately at odds with objective fact), but its effects are beneficial in terms of cohesion (collective or community subjectivity, mutual recognition, mutual aid) – or, conversely, destructive if a cover for the interest of a violent and intolerant group (usually a minority of those they claim to represent). However, the critical or objective step is itself the product of a point of view: by step, a collective point of view (constituting ‘objectivity’) is a ‘collective subjectivity’ of thought and witness (legal, medical, scientific); and then, individuated, a ‘purely’ subjective experiential step, with this experience of verification taking place in the individual, for the individual (and, even more particularly or concretely, embodied or contextual… as where and when, as well as who?).

We might note that something happening ‘for’ us, may carry two meanings: as before us or for us (’to us’) as experienced by means of our perceptions (our present, as usual, motivated by our memory, our past) – the object in the subject, by which means we coordinate with ‘the Real’; and, secondly, as informed by our expectations and our desires, ‘for us’ as reality apparently providing what we want (perhaps showing a trace of animism or existential centrism) as our point of view… subjective, actively ‘prompting’ the object (again, our present as motivated by our past, but this time by our desire of the future become our desire of the present). Degrees of subjectivity (like the duration of time) ‘distorted’, elided or created by desire…

So the objective side becomes subjective when we ask the question ‘who sees’? Here we are moving from community to individual, from object as ‘objective’ (defined by plural witness or empiricism) to the perceiving subject as subjectivity (our experience of the object) or assertive subjectivity (if the object is ‘distorted’ by our emotions). Conversely, the subject of belief, in turn, becomes the object of another’s perception (or the inward, self-conscious, perception of the self, where we ‘see’ our self as other, as object) of self now considered as object… Stages or loops natural to the diremption, but usually occluded or lost in either empirical science (where subjectivity and contextual embeddedness often disappear) or fervent belief (where reality itself, the object, disappears). Blind spots we see in the perennial re-warmings of the debate between ‘idealism’ and ‘materialism’ where we also find the same restriction to a one-sided nature, a denial of the other half of human becoming in order to constitute and enforce a picture of a limited and fixed being (in effect the desire for an easily managed monism). Thus the subjective or concrete, particulars are usually excluded in the process of ‘object making’ (or production of ‘Truth’) as its ‘blind spot’: whilst in belief as experience (and what identity does not carry some beliefs as among its fundamental ‘identity propositions’) excludes the object stage if contrary: objectivity, in turn, is often inimical to beliefs (as to the emotive, ecstatic or cathartic side of aesthetics, as to the embeddedness of the subject – at least until quantum theory). Again a double exclusion which shows one step in the diremption foregrounded, and at what cost, what exclusion, what restriction (yet, it must be noted, the ‘general view’, as a ‘general economy’ is itself always also restricted in some manner – we may have our cake and eat it, but not at the ‘same time’ – rather as a process of oscillation, perhaps a little like the concept of ‘hermaneutics’, of knowledge as (an unfinishing) process, rather than closed-off or finished event). Being is always undermined by Becoming.

Conclusion.

So with an awareness of the diremption taken as a kind of method, both sides, ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’, together with their resultant oscillation, can, and indeed must, be put into play. A case of ‘both-and’, where the two sides combine, but without synthesis, and featuring their contradiction rather than overcoming it (as in the conflict of actuality and imagination, of the difference of real and imaginary identification… and of theory and experience, belief and function, involvement and distance, etc., etc…). So showing the dissonance proper to the relationship of the first hand world of experience and of second hand or received knowledge (with the former relying on the latter for recognition and the latter upon the former as site of perception and presence). ‘Put into play’ would, of course, include, the passage of subject and object moments through each other… a feature of the diremption as process which gives ‘oscillation’: where any subject position (‘in’) examined immediately becomes object (‘out’); and in the same way, every objective analysis must finally be borne by, experienced, by a concrete imbedded subject… The experience of social difference and its description and normative ascription from without… The former becomes as (if) seen from without, and the latter ‘subject to’ its actualisation as from within a concrete point of view… With these in turn becoming object embedded in a subject and subject as object in question… (with these in turn… (with these…)…). So on infinitum: oscillation. A ‘method’ whose moment of ‘truth’ lies when it touches infinity… (the avoidance of this constituting the comforts of ‘ideology’).