1. The self is an accidental, muscularised outcome of, an exaptation to, the interplay of various organic material processes.
2. The more the self is flexed, the more fixed it becomes, as both an outcome and condition, of the systems into which it is embedded.
3. The visceral reality of the self is performed within its constantly maintained separation from the purely causal relations of the material systems of which it was originally, and thus never, a simple effect.
4. At its apogee the self is an overdetermined object, a black box of outputs that are not particularly aligned with its inputs.
5. The self has become a complex system, it has emergent capabilities that are not reducible to its component parts.
1. The self is an accidental, muscular effect of the interplay of different organic systems.
2. At the point where it is separated from those systems, by virtue of its emergent properties, it becomes defensible on its own terms, and subject to the principle of conservation.
2.2. The self’s functional operation supposes that the structural arguments in favour of its appearance continue to defeat the arguments that are directed against it.
3. The increasing complexity of the self, as it is realised (by an internally regulated series of locks, weirs and floodgates) in a canal system of sensitisations and desensitisations, increases the proportion, or raises the level, of the subtleties of existence within the self-awareness of its existence.
1. The self as an object of politics requires an ever-increasing level of productive complexity in the productions of the self... thus the soul is not to be thought of as an origin, but as a destination.
1. The self is defined, because it is not originary, because it is a secondary phenomena, by its reality.
1. The self is defined by its need, a need not just to be real, but to feel real, to experience the narrative process of its existence as itself.
1. If the self is mere exaptation, an excrescence of other, more decisive processes, then it does not follow that it has a particularly precarious existence.
2. The self is not under threat, in the sense that it depends for its presence on a perpetual recurrence of the original accident to maintain it.
3. The door through which it first arrived is now shut. The self cannot be devolved. And given its dependence on the intersections of different organic processes at different levels and of different complexities, the self is in fact a remarkably robust result – like a hologram.
3.1. The self is produced invariably throughout all social formations but its quality as an object is changeable.
3.2. Where there is society, there is self.
3.3. The self does not predate social relations but is a mechanical record of them.
3.4. The self becomes more socialised, that is it increases its presence in society, the more complex its internal operations become.
4. The self is no more bizarre, or unprecedented, than any other specific fragment of existence.
4.1. All fragments of existence depend on, and express in part, the complex of relations, of which they are first outcome and later condition.
5. Strangely, if the self is robust in its distribution, its qualitative realisation is variable, and varied beyond the reasonable expectation for a non-selected constant.
5.1. The self does not directly map onto its conditions, and yet accurately expresses them on its own terms, through laughter.
5.2. The self rarely maps directly onto itself, and inaccurately expresses this in tears.
1. The self’s homeostatic system, which conforms to its own design, and through which it produces its own manifestations in society, responds to external systems, also on its own terms; thus ensuring a coherence in its illusions.
1. At the level of the quality of its existence, the self is highly responsive, and thus vulnerable, to social and historical processes; but it cannot directly process such threats.
1. Even where the threat to it is immanent, the self must present it as otherwise.
