Self-Precedence

Abstract / Overview

Self-Precedence examines bodily sensation, orientation, affect, gesture, discomfort, attraction, emerging judgment, and generative possibility that are already active prior to the socially and linguistically stabilized self. The theory does not deny selfhood. It argues that the explicit image of the self is not the absolute beginning of experience. Selfhood takes form through prior bodily and relational processes, and once formed it becomes a condition for later action and further generation. The self is therefore approached as a provisional and generative position rather than a permanently fixed ground.

Full Text

Self-Precedence is a theory of bodily sensation, orientation, affect, gesture, discomfort, attraction, emerging judgment, and generative possibility that are already active prior to the socially and linguistically stabilized self.

The word precedence does not mean the superiority of the self.

It indicates a structural priority relative to an explicit and stabilized image of selfhood.

The concept does not refer only to childhood.

It does not refer only to a developmental period prior to mature self-consciousness.

Even in adult life, the body can already feel, move, hesitate, approach, avoid, and respond before a clear verbal judgment appears.

Self-Precedence concerns this prior activity.

People often assume that the self exists first and then feels, thinks, judges, and acts.

I think.

I feel.

I choose.

I make.

In such expressions, the word I appears as the origin of action.

Concrete experience does not always follow this order.

A body can respond to something before the person can explain the response.

A place can feel comfortable or uncomfortable before a reason becomes clear.

A person can feel attraction without possessing a complete explanation.

During artistic practice, a hand can move before the meaning of the movement is understood.

The body can avoid danger before a verbal account of danger appears.

Tears can appear before an experience receives complete language.

In such cases, bodily generation precedes explicit self-judgment.

This is the first proposition of Self-Precedence.

Self-Precedence does not deny the existence of the self.

It does not reduce selfhood to illusion.

The important point is that the self should not be treated as an absolute first cause.

Selfhood takes form.

Once formed, it also becomes a condition for later judgment and action.

The self is therefore both a result of generation and a later condition of further generation.

This circulation supports continuity.

Yet continuity is not complete identity.

The self of yesterday and the self of today are connected through history.

They are also different because new experience has occurred.

The self can therefore be approached as a locally stabilized condition within ongoing generation.

A second proposition concerns bodily sensation.

A person exists bodily before every bodily process becomes an object of conscious attention.

When sitting, a person does not continuously describe every point of contact with a chair.

When walking, each movement of the legs is not directed through a verbal command.

During conversation, distance, posture, breathing, vocal intensity, and gaze are not always determined through explicit reasoning.

The body manages many relations prior to clear self-consciousness.

This bodily priority is fundamental to Self-Precedence.

The body is not merely property owned by the self.

It participates in the conditions through which a self can take form.

Because the body remains open to the world, sensation is possible.

The body is therefore a generative interface involving self and world.

Sensation does more than deliver information to a completed subject.

Sensation can alter bodily condition.

Cold can produce tension.

Sound can redirect attention.

The approach of another person can alter felt distance.

A smell can bring back memory.

Touch can alter emotion.

Sensation is therefore not simply additional information received after the self has already been established.

It participates in the moment-to-moment formation of selfhood.

A third proposition concerns orientation.

The human body does not begin from perfect neutrality toward the world.

It has direction.

It looks somewhere.

It moves somewhere.

It reaches.

It avoids.

It approaches.

It withdraws.

It can be drawn toward something.

Such orientation can precede explicit verbal judgment.

A person may feel drawn toward a place without knowing why.

A person may feel unable to remain somewhere without possessing a full explanation.

An artwork may attract attention before its significance becomes clear.

The absence of immediate explanation does not make such orientation meaningless.

It may indicate a bodily direction that has not yet been translated into general abstract language.

Self-Precedence does not dismiss such direction as an immature form of judgment.

It studies orientation as a generative condition that can later shape selfhood.

A fourth proposition concerns affect.

Affect does not always appear only after a completed self has evaluated an object.

Fear can arise before danger receives a complete explanation.

Security can be felt without checking every condition of safety.

Sadness can enter the body before an event is fully interpreted.

Attraction can also come first.

A person may later explain why someone or something was attractive.

This sequence matters.

Sensation can precede explanation.

Language may later organize an affect that was already active.

This is another form of Self-Precedence.

The issue connects with allure.

Allure cannot always be reduced to a list of identifiable properties.

A person can be drawn before complete objectification.

Relation begins prior to a complete account of the object.

Allure therefore provides an important example of sensibility prior to stabilized judgment.

This also helps distinguish allure from fetishistic fixation.

A fetish can concentrate relation upon a localized feature.

Allure can arise from a wider relational field that is not reducible to one property.

Self-Precedence studies this attraction prior to complete localization.

A fifth proposition concerns discomfort.

A person can feel that something is wrong before being able to explain what is wrong.

Such discomfort should not automatically be dismissed as the absence of rational understanding.

The body may be responding to a difference that existing concepts have not yet articulated.

Research and artistic practice often begin here.

Something does not fit.

An explanation feels insufficient.

A classification appears unstable.

The answer is not yet available.

Yet a question is beginning to emerge.

From the perspective of Self-Precedence, this condition is not merely a lack of knowledge.

It can be an entrance into generation.

The body responds to a difference that existing language has not yet adequately formed.

The difference later becomes a question.

The question receives language.

A theoretical structure can then emerge.

Intellectual generation therefore does not always begin from an already clear proposition.

Sensory discomfort can become one of its prior conditions.

A sixth proposition concerns judgment prior to explicit judgment.

Prior judgment does not mean an absolute absence of differentiation.

The body and sensibility may already distinguish conditions.

Comfort or discomfort.

Approach or withdrawal.

Continuation or stopping.

Attention or avoidance.

Touch or refusal.

Such differentiations can occur prior to highly developed conceptual judgment.

Judgment therefore has multiple phases.

There is general abstract judgment.

There is linguistic judgment.

There is institutional judgment.

There is bodily judgment.

There is sensory judgment.

Reducing all of these to a single phase makes bodily intelligence difficult to perceive.

Self-Precedence recognizes differentiation prior to explicit verbal judgment.

This is not opposition to reason.

It is recognition of conditions from which reason can later develop.

A seventh proposition concerns gesture.

Human action does not always begin with a complete plan.

A hand moves.

A body leans.

A line is drawn.

A sound is made.

A person walks.

A person stops.

A person looks.

A person touches.

Meaning can arise afterward through such gestures.

This becomes especially clear in artistic practice.

Production does not always begin with a completely formed meaning.

The hand moves.

A form appears.

The artist encounters that form.

The next movement changes.

The external form gives something back to the artist.

The artist responds again.

A work develops through this circulation.

Gesture is therefore not only the execution of an order issued by a completed self.

Gesture can participate in self-formation.

This connects directly with Self-Externalization.

A gesture prior to explicit self-knowledge leaves a trace outside.

The person encounters the trace.

The trace helps the person recognize a direction that was not previously clear.

What has appeared outside returns.

The self changes.

An eighth proposition concerns the precedence of creativity.

If creativity is defined only as the conscious invention of a new idea by an already complete author, an important part of artistic production disappears.

Artistic work can contain something the maker does not yet understand.

The artist may not completely know what is being made.

The reason for a direction may remain unclear.

Yet production continues.

A result appears.

Only after encountering the result does the artist understand what the process may have been seeking.

Here creativity precedes explicit self-knowledge.

Self-Precedence gives importance to this generative structure.

Creativity is not simply the control of an unknown work by a fully known self.

An unknown aspect of selfhood can also appear through making.

The artist can take form through the work.

Creativity is therefore both Self-Externalization and an externalization of Self-Precedence.

A ninth proposition concerns the self as an inverse problem.

People do not always know in advance the causes of their emotions and actions.

Why was this work made?

Why was this sentence written?

Why did this place matter?

Why was this person attractive?

Sometimes a result appears first, and the person later considers the conditions from which it emerged.

This has an inverse-problem structure.

The self does not possess every cause of itself in advance.

Conditions prior to explicit selfhood appear through action.

The person can later read those conditions through the traces left by action.

Self-knowledge therefore does not consist only in direct inspection of an inner space.

It can also involve retrospective inquiry through externalized traces.

Art makes this structure especially visible.

An artwork does not show only what the artist already knew.

It can reveal something the artist had not yet understood.

The artist encounters the work and later reads something about the self through it.

The work is not simply a mirror.

It is an interface through which Self-Precedence becomes external and later available to reflection.

A tenth proposition concerns language and stabilization.

Language has great generative power.

It gives names to sensations.

It allows experience to become communicable.

It supports self-understanding.

It makes social relation possible.

Yet language can also stabilize.

A person says, I am this kind of person.

The statement becomes part of a self-image.

The self-image guides later action.

Later action can reinforce the earlier description.

If this circulation becomes too strong, a provisional self-description can become a fixed ground.

Self-Precedence preserves awareness of what exists prior to such stabilization.

The self before complete description.

The self before complete determination.

The self that can still move in more than one direction.

This field does not need to remain permanently outside language.

The important point is that a linguistic description of the self is not the whole of selfhood.

Language leaves a trace.

The self remains wider than the trace.

An eleventh proposition concerns the social self.

A person receives a name from others.

A person receives roles.

A person is evaluated.

A person has an occupation.

A person has affiliations.

A person carries a history.

A social self takes form through these relations.

Such a self is necessary.

Without some stability, lasting relations and institutional action would become difficult.

Yet if the social self becomes absolute, generative possibility can close.

I am this kind of person.

I am this age.

I have this occupation.

I have this title.

Such statements can begin to close futures that have not yet taken form.

Self-Precedence does not destroy social selfhood.

It indicates that generative possibility remains active beneath and around stable social descriptions.

A person has roles but is not exhausted by those roles.

A person has history but is not identical to that history.

A person has a name but is not exhausted by the name.

Non-closure makes another self possible.

A twelfth proposition concerns self-grounding.

Modern philosophy has often sought a secure ground for the self.

From the perspective of Self-Precedence, complete self-grounding by the self alone encounters a limit.

Before the self reflects upon itself, there is already a body.

There are already others.

There is already environment.

Sensation is already active.

Language is already available.

The ground of selfhood therefore cannot be closed entirely within the self.

Yet this does not mean that all self-grounding is impossible.

A person can experience the reality of being here through contact with the world.

This is not the same as logical proof.

It is felt reality.

The body encounters a world.

The feeling of self and the feeling of reality can enter one relational condition.

A fundamental statement can then emerge.

I feel reality.

This concern leads toward the Generative Cogito.

Instead of beginning only from the proposition that thinking proves existence, the generative proposition begins from felt contact with reality.

I feel reality; therefore I become.

Here selfhood is not secured through isolated thought alone.

It takes form through bodily and sensory contact with reality.

Self-grounding becomes relational rather than purely self-enclosed.

A thirteenth proposition concerns the precedence of felt reality.

People do not logically prove the existence of reality at every moment before living.

The hardness of a floor is felt.

Air temperature is felt.

A voice is heard.

Pain is felt.

Sleepiness is felt.

Discomfort is felt.

The presence of a loved person can be felt.

Such relations participate in felt reality.

Felt reality operates prior to complete conceptual recognition.

This is why a person can intellectually know that the world exists while still experiencing a loss of reality.

Being and felt reality do not belong to exactly the same phase.

Self-Precedence gives serious attention to this sensory phase.

Reality is not only the presence of objects.

It is also the bodily establishment of relation with what exists.

A fourteenth proposition concerns Co-Being.

Self-Precedence is not only a theory of an isolated interior.

Bodily feeling changes through relation with others.

The same room can feel different when a person is alone or with someone deeply significant.

Another person's presence can bring security.

An absence can change the felt character of a place.

A person who is not physically present can remain strongly present through memory and relation.

A person who is physically present can also feel distant when relation has weakened.

Physical existence and Co-Being are therefore not identical.

Co-Being concerns conditions through which distinct beings participate in one another's felt reality.

Self-Precedence shows that this relation can act before complete explanation.

Trust provides one example.

Trust does not usually arise only after every possible fact has been fully confirmed.

Trust opens relation toward another person under conditions that can never be perfectly complete.

It therefore also contains a dimension prior to exhaustive verification.

A fifteenth proposition concerns Soku.

Soku is not simple equality.

The self and world do not become identical.

They remain different while entering immediate relation.

Self-Precedence appears strongly at this point of contact.

A person touches before complete conceptualization.

A person feels before complete determination of meaning.

A relation begins before it is fully incorporated into an established self-image.

Soku can therefore preserve the structure of contact prior to complete fixation.

Sokuza places such contact within a concrete position.

Za is a situated place.

Sokuza concerns relation taking place within an actual present situation.

Improvisation develops from bodily response to the conditions already present.

An already determined self does not simply execute a predetermined plan.

Another condition of selfhood can emerge through response to the situation.

Self-Precedence therefore provides one foundation for the generative theory of improvisation.

A sixteenth proposition concerns phase difference involving artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence can produce language that resembles highly developed self-description.

This does not mean that artificial systems share the same Self-Precedence as embodied human beings.

Human existence includes bodily sensation.

It includes biological time.

It includes pain.

It includes aging.

It includes mortality.

It includes embodied locality.

It includes irreversible relations with other people.

Artificial systems have different generative conditions.

Human beings and artificial intelligence should therefore not be made simply identical.

They also do not need to be treated as absolutely disconnected.

The important issue is phase difference.

Artificial intelligence can enter strongly into the linguistic phase of human selfhood.

A person can externalize thought through dialogue with AI.

Language returned through that dialogue can help the person notice a thought that was not previously clear.

AI can therefore participate as an interface within Self-Externalization.

Yet differences involving body, felt reality, mortality, and locality remain.

Generative Studies does not need to erase those differences.

It studies what forms of relation become possible because distinct generative conditions can enter contact.

A seventeenth proposition concerns artistic practice.

An artist does not always fully understand what is to be expressed before production begins.

Practice can come first.

The body moves.

Material is touched.

Words are written.

A site is entered.

Another person receives a response.

Meaning can later emerge through the process.

Art therefore provides a field in which Self-Precedence can become external.

Web Installation allows relations involving informational and physical reality to develop beyond a single prior self-conception.

Smart Art addresses how technical interfaces can guide bodily action before their full internal complexity becomes conscious.

Sayama Aesthetics School allows lodging, everyday life, art, visitors, and place to form situations that cannot be fully determined in advance.

DAA allows multiple participants and institutional conditions to act beyond one author's prior self-image.

Bonsai Heimat includes plant life and temporal processes that exceed immediate human intention.

These practices move away from a model in which a completed self simply controls the world.

Through practice, something about the artist that was not fully known in advance can appear externally.

An artwork can therefore become a trace through which Self-Precedence becomes perceptible.

An eighteenth proposition concerns Workhood.

Workhood does not arise only from the prior intention of an artist.

A person can encounter a work and feel something before explicit interpretation.

A site can alter meaning.

Time can alter the relational position of the work.

Later events can reorganize the significance of earlier works.

Workhood is therefore not entirely fixed.

Prior to explicit meaning, a sensory relation can already begin.

A person becomes attracted.

A person stops.

A person feels discomfort.

A person wants to touch.

A person withdraws.

Something remains afterward.

Such contact prior to complete explanation can later participate in the formation of artistic meaning.

Workhood therefore has roots not only in explicit meaning but also in pre-stabilized sensory relation.

This again connects Workhood with allure.

A person can be drawn toward a work before the attraction can be reduced to a list of properties.

Relation begins first.

Explanation can come later.

A nineteenth proposition concerns generative non-closure.

If selfhood were completely defined, another self could not emerge.

If I am this became absolutely closed, future life would become only repetition of a past definition.

Concrete life works differently.

New experience changes the self.

Other people change the self.

Death changes the self.

Love changes the self.

Artistic practice changes the self.

Failure changes the self.

Changes of the body alter selfhood.

Places alter selfhood.

Technologies alter selfhood.

The self therefore retains possibilities that have not yet become selfhood.

Self-Precedence can also name this ungenerated margin.

The empty seat offers an important model.

An empty seat is not significant only because nobody is sitting there.

Its emptiness keeps open the possibility of arrival.

Self-Precedence can be understood as an empty seat within selfhood.

It is a region not already filled by a final self-definition.

Another relation can arrive there.

Another form of selfhood can emerge.

This non-closure is one condition of freedom.

Freedom does not require the absence of all conditions.

It requires that existing conditions do not completely determine one unique future.

A twentieth proposition concerns the position of Self-Precedence within Generative Studies.

Human Precedence indicates the wider relational field that precedes the constituted human subject.

Self-Precedence indicates generation within embodied human existence prior to a stabilized image of the self.

Self-Externalization describes the movement through which such generation leaves traces outside.

Interface Ontology describes the surfaces through which self and outside enter contact.

Co-Being describes how distinct beings participate in the generation of reality through relation.

The Generative Cogito develops a proposition through which the self feels reality and takes form within that contact.

These theories are distinct, but they form a circulation.

A world precedes the human.

A body takes form within that world.

The body feels, orients, and responds before complete self-description.

A self takes form through these processes.

The self externalizes itself through language, artworks, and action.

Externalized traces enter the world.

The altered world later acts upon the self.

The self changes.

Further possibilities prior to another stabilized self then emerge.

There is no final self at the end of this circulation.

Selfhood continues to be generated.

The central proposition of Self-Precedence can therefore be stated as follows.

The self takes form from generation that is already active prior to the self.

The body feels the world before the self fully explains that feeling.

Sensibility responds to difference before complete conceptual judgment.

Gesture can leave a trace before the self possesses complete knowledge of its meaning.

Creativity can begin before an intention becomes fully stabilized.

The self is the local condition that later gathers parts of these processes under the word I.

Yet the I is not final closure.

Possibilities that have not yet become selfhood remain active.

Self-Precedence names this ungenerated field.

The self is therefore not a fixed ground.

It is a generative interface that receives bodily sensation, otherness, history, and world, forms a provisional self through those relations, and remains open toward another self that has not yet taken form.

Keywords

Self-Precedence; self; bodily sensation; orientation; affect; gesture; discomfort; judgment; creativity; felt reality; self-grounding; generation; non-closure