Human Precedence and Self-Precedence

Abstract / Overview

Human Precedence and Self-Precedence is a research area that does not treat the human subject or the self as the absolute origin of reality. It studies relations, bodies, sensation, environments, others, language, history, culture, institutions, technology, and generative possibilities that are already active prior to a stabilized human subject or self. Self-Precedence gives particular attention to sensation, orientation, gesture, affect, judgment, and creative possibility that can operate before selfhood becomes socially and linguistically fixed.

Full Text

Human Precedence and Self-Precedence is a research area within Generative Studies that questions the assumption that the human subject or the self must be the absolute starting point of reality.

Modern thought often places the human subject at the origin of knowledge, judgment, meaning, value, and action.

Generative Studies asks how that apparent origin itself takes form.

The world is already active before a human subject interprets it.

Bodies, material conditions, environments, other people, time, and history are already present.

Sensation, breathing, posture, orientation, affect, attraction, discomfort, and bodily response can also operate before a person gives them a stable linguistic form.

Human existence and selfhood therefore do not begin from an empty point created by the individual.

Human Precedence studies conditions that are active prior to human interpretation and self-definition.

Precedence here is not limited to chronological priority.

It also refers to structural conditions that participate in making human existence possible.

Land, climate, gravity, bodies, biological conditions, materials, other people, social structures, cultures, languages, and technologies are not created entirely by an individual person.

Human existence begins within conditions that are already active.

Human Precedence does not deny the human.

It places human existence within a wider generative field.

The human subject is not an observer standing entirely outside the world.

Human existence itself takes form through relations within the world.

Self-Precedence extends this research to the formation of selfhood.

The self does not begin as a fully completed identity.

Before a person has a name, social role, or language for self-description, the body is already touching, sensing, moving, and responding to the world.

Such conditions contain generative possibilities that have not yet been stabilized as a fixed concept of self.

Self-Precedence does not treat this prior condition as mere immaturity or absence.

Sensation is already active.

Orientation is active.

Gesture is active.

Attraction and avoidance are active.

Forms of judgment can operate before they become explicit statements.

Creative possibilities can also appear through movement, contact, selection, and action.

Self-Precedence is therefore not an empty space in which no self exists.

It is a field of multiple generative possibilities prior to the stabilization of a particular self.

A self takes form as some of these possibilities become concrete through relation.

The self is therefore not only a cause of generation.

It is also a result of generation.

Once formed, however, the self becomes a condition for later judgment and action.

The result of one generative process can become a condition for another.

A circulation is formed.

A generated self acts in the world.

That action changes relational conditions.

The changed relations then participate in the further formation of the self.

The self can therefore be studied as a local condition within an ongoing generative process rather than as a fixed point.

This structure is closely connected with Self-Externalization.

People speak, act, use tools, leave records, make artworks, and form relations with others.

These activities leave traces outside the self.

Yet externalized traces do not remain completely detached.

Words, artworks, records, and relations can later act upon the person who produced them.

Self-Externalization is therefore not merely the expression of an already completed self.

Externalization becomes part of the conditions through which later forms of selfhood develop.

This process includes irreversibility.

A spoken word, an action, or a formed relation cannot always be made entirely absent again.

Such events remain as history.

The self continues to take form while carrying these histories.

Selfhood therefore includes more than present self-awareness.

It also includes conditions that were not chosen, relations that were not fully recognized, forgotten experiences, and bodily traces.

In this sense, the self is not completely transparent even to itself.

Human Precedence and Self-Precedence extend the relational priority of Generative Topological Ontology into research on human existence and selfhood.

If being takes form through relation, the human subject and the self cannot be exceptions.

Their boundaries can also change through relation with environments and others.

This concern connects with Interface Ontology.

The body is a primary interface.

It is not simply a wall separating self from world.

Seeing, hearing, touching, moving, pain, and pleasure are ways through which contact takes place.

Through bodily contact, both self-understanding and relation to the world can change.

Language is another interface of self-formation.

People describe themselves through languages they did not create alone.

Even the word used for the self has a history prior to the individual speaker.

By using existing language, a person can objectify experience and develop a sense of identity.

Language therefore does not simply express the self.

It can participate in generating the self.

At the same time, language can stabilize selfhood too strongly.

Identity can become limited through labels, occupations, positions, evaluations, affiliations, or other categories.

Self-Precedence points toward generative possibilities that remain outside such stabilized descriptions.

This concern also connects with Namelessness.

Names are important for social relation, but a name does not exhaust existence.

Before a person is reduced to a role, label, or evaluation, generative possibilities remain.

Artistic practice makes this especially visible.

An artist does not always begin with a fully completed meaning and simply transfer it into a work.

Bodily movement, material contact, accident, failure, discomfort, and responses from others can reveal directions that were not consciously planned.

An artwork can therefore become an interface through which generative possibilities prior to a stabilized self become externalized.

Improvisation provides another example.

Improvised action cannot rely entirely on a completed decision made in advance.

Action takes form through current environments, bodies, other people, and events.

The self is not the complete cause of the action.

Self and action can develop together.

Human Precedence and Self-Precedence also connect with Co-Being.

The self is not completed first and only later placed in relation with others.

Being called, seen, touched, trusted, rejected, or remembered by others can participate in self-formation.

The interior of the self already carries histories of relation.

Self and other are not identical.

They are also not completely unrelated.

Difference can remain while relation changes the position of each.

This question connects with felt reality.

A sense of reality is not sustained only through internal certainty.

Bodies, actions, environments, and relations with others contribute to the feeling that self and world are real.

This opens a path toward the Generative Cogito.

The question is not limited to internal thought as the foundation of certainty.

It also concerns how the self feels reality and takes form through relation with reality.

Artificial intelligence makes Human Precedence especially important.

Activities once treated as uniquely human, including language production, image generation, information processing, and forms of judgment support, can now be carried out by artificial systems.

This makes definitions of the human based only on lists of abilities increasingly unstable.

The main research question is not whether humans or artificial intelligence are simply superior.

It is how beings with different bodies, temporal conditions, histories, environments, and generative structures can form new relations.

This can help reposition the human as a generative being rather than a permanently fixed category.

Self-Precedence also provides a critical perspective on contemporary forms of self-objectification.

People increasingly encounter themselves through profiles, scores, evaluations, followers, careers, categories, and data.

These can help people understand social position, but they can also reduce selfhood to fixed information.

Self-Precedence studies what cannot be completely contained by such objectification.

This includes sensations without established names, discomfort that has not yet been explained, actions that have not yet received value, and creativity that has not yet become a recognized work.

The future is present within this openness.

If the self were completely known and closed, no new self-generation would remain possible.

The self can change because it remains structurally non-closed even to itself.

Self-Precedence is therefore not a concept for returning to a lost past.

It concerns openness toward future forms of selfhood that have not yet been stabilized.

Human Precedence and Self-Precedence do not diminish the value of human existence or selfhood.

They clarify the extensive relations, histories, bodily conditions, environments, and others through which human existence becomes possible.

The self is not an isolated subject separated from the world.

It takes form through contact with the world, leaves traces in the world, and changes again through those traces.

Human Precedence and Self-Precedence study this circulation.

Their purpose is not to erase the self.

It is to reconsider the self not as a final foundation, but as an interface that continues to be generated.

Keywords

Human Precedence; Self-Precedence; human; self; body; sensation; relation; environment; other; language; history; generative possibility; Self-Externalization; generation