Introduction

The Case for Facultative Development: The Life Way of the Aspiring Mind

But now day breaks! I waited and saw it come, And what I saw, the hallowed, my word shall convey, For she, she herself, who is older than the ages And higher than the gods of Orient and occident, Nature has now awoken amid the clang of arms, And from high aether down to the low abyss, According to fixed law, begotten, as in the past, on holy Chaos, Delight, the all-creative, Delights in self-renewal.1 The true struggles of our time, the only ones which are significant, are struggles between humanity which has already collapsed and humanity which still has roots but is struggling to keep them or find new ones. 2 Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be breakthrough. The person going through ego-loss or transcendental experiences may or may not be come in different ways confused. Then he might be legitimately be regarded as mad. But to be mad is no necessarily to be ill, notwithstanding that in our culture the two categories have become confused. From the alienated starting point of our pseudo-sanity, everything is equivocal. Our sanity is not true sanity; their madness is not true madness. . Let no one suppose that we meet true madness any more than that we are truly saneTrue sanity entails in one way or another the dissolution of the normal ego.3

Taking Up the Human Endeavor

The term Facultative Development does not refer to the development of faculties, but, instead, to the capacity to generate and develop any faculty whatsoever. This capacity is
Hlderlin, As on a Holiday, Friedrich Hlderlin: Selected Poems and Fragments, M. Hamburgre, Tr (New York; 1998); p. 173-4. 2 Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston, IL; 1970); p. 1 3 R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience, quoted in Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis, MN; 1983); p. 132
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spurred into action by the very condition of our creaturely life, and is borne into its human exigencies and joys on the wings of aspiration. This essay explores the way that such an urge to the aspiring life is organized into a powerful force that perhaps only now are we able to comprehend. Whence this capability? How does it do its work? How is it a distinctive capability at all? These are the questions that guide our inquiry. We need a new set of questions because so many of the old ones are no longer productive, revelatory or even interesting. For example, we are no longer merely a species that is distinct from other creatures because we have language other species have some sort of linguistic abilities; we are no longer merely rational animals, that has been proven of limited application. But as one descriptor after another loses its power, one notion continues to arouse curiosity: that is, no other species undertakes to methodically and totally change its way of being; and what is more, no other creature is willing to continually think of new, more expansive and more encompassing ways in which to conduct this disrupting endeavor; and thus no other creature has made it incumbent upon itself to guide that disruption, to experiment with viable limitations, and to channel industries of production and education toward no other capability than to improve our means of doing so. No other species takes itself as its very own project, problem, promise and prospect even unto its own death. It goes without saying that to propose something on the order of changing human nature begs the question, toward what? In what way, toward what kind of being is this change driving, or are we driving ourselves? This is no mere technological question. In fact, it is precisely the kind of thinking that restricts our best minds to doing the kind of limited, limiting and ultimately deadening technological innovation that we want to challenge. In what follows, I want to make the case that in order to fulfill this mission of changing the human endeavor and guiding that change, we also have to develop new means for comprehending occurrence, the very heart of the generativity of our living; and then, we are in a position to recast our sense of our own ongoing action, our encountering and engaging what occurs at every level throughout all the currents which our lives comprise.; we need a new orientation of judging the nature of those occurrences, and new modes of interaction that are adequate to the potencies that we are now more in touch with. In the view presented here, to simply become more efficient in our means of production make more, more cheaply, with marginally less environmental destruction in

order to satisfy the needs of mushrooming populations, is not a sufficient perspective for what we are considering. The problems that arise from mass production or creative destruction, or mal-distribution of the fruits from these labors, not to mention the earthravishing pollution it generates, all these problems stir our unease with our situation, but they are not sufficient to uncover the potencies that are contending for attention and that offer a new start, a new framework, new capabilities (which, in turn, will engender their own problems, of course). We are striving to contribute to envisioning the very apparition of a new sensibility, the hints of new modes of engaging, ones that undertake Nietzsches revaluation of all values and so offers new spaces in which human engagement with other people, nature and the cosmos transpires. The focus of this essay, is thus on aspiration, and it aims to provide a gateway to considering a new way of knowing ourselves, one that I call facultative development. SOMETHING BREWING: INCREASING COMPLEXITY. I bring a message: there is something of a completely different order that is brewing, already underway, in our appreciation of the human endeavor. This is the Age of Aquarius, after all, isnt it? So what is underway? We are not only in the process of changing the way we do things, or even developing new things to do; in addition to these alterations of our life ways we are also changing the very object of our engagement. First, there is the change in the conception of the human. This change in the sense of what is at stake if humans are to prove their worthiness of any kind of distinction at all no less a vaunted status vis--vis nature is momentous. We are no longer measuring ourselves against a standard based on one or another existing capability or skill language or technological prowess -- but instead we are comprehending that through the ages and epochs, ever since the first exodus from Africa, we have generated capabilities never existent on the face of the earth: that is, art religion, philosophy and even thought. Second, our sciences, arts and literature are continually breaking the boundaries of what thought and sensibility had once countenanced as viable for human comprehension. Not only new varieties the entities we already know, such as planets or elements or species, being discovered, but also new models of just what constitutes a viable experiential verity are being grasped and these reformations of the real are occurring across the board at the frontiers of our creative endeavors. Third, philosophy is characterizing and developing language around modes of discernment that precede any subject/object efficacy, or even any consciousness/unconsciousness formation of

experiencing. And, what is more, these generative fields are working hard and with great generosity in attempting to listen to each other and inoculate their discourses from isolation.4 In this new vision,5 another sense of the active and productive dynamics that drive the generativity of the universe emerges: the dynamic of increasing complexity. In this notion, it is not that formations of matter and forces merely become more complicated which they do. Rather, under the right conditions of energy and density these dynamics -- which include nature and humans, the cosmos, and all its modes, in specific localities -- engender stable structures. Then in their continuing exposure to these great potencies and the increasing diversity of entities, creatures and beings around them, these entities not only hold on to their organized modes, but also reorganize and reprioritize them. At certain points in their existence, they burst the bounds of their former constellations, break out of their existing modes of organizing and engaging and open onto new horizons of viability. This surging toward increasing complexity thus engendered first quanta, then atoms, then matter and galaxies, and then living beings. Each of these formations, taking up their places on the margins of the possible, formed structures that were able to withstand tremendously destructive and obliterating forces; and so we see how increasing complexity enables these structures to become more flexible, mobile, sensitive and then comprehending of their respective milieus, engendering modes not only of stable endurance, but reproductive and projective spanning of time periods and ranges of circumstances. In other words, taken as whole, and taken as the very condition of what the human endeavor can engage, the course of living tends toward developing structures that are capable of sustaining more expansive and more encompassing ways of engagement with what occurs in our milieu (including our own creaturely existence, other beings, nature and the cosmos).

Aspiration: Human Complexity Increasing

INDIVIDUATION. In the human case, that process of self-organization toward increasing complexity takes an unusual form. Humans, that is, assemble once loosely associated competencies and configure them according to self-determined criteria and then even more surprisingly, develop new capabilities ,ones that are unique to the species. To be
Derrida cites the contemporary rise of plural rationalities, in Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (Stanford; CA); p. 120. 5 I would say that self-organization comprises more than a paradigm that allows for the elaboration of occurrences along the lines of a particular logic or rationality. I hold that this term names a different vision of occurrence, and one that bears with it openings onto new ethical possibilities (obligations to the other, Levinas might say) in addition to the perturbations in cognition and reason it stirs.
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sure, all living things participate in processes that are distributed all across their respective milieus that accomplish these feats. This is what we call evolution. But in the case of the human, something else occurs as well (in addition, not in place of). That is, humans elect to comprehend the processes by which new capabilities are developed and then undertake to guide these forces to the exclusive benefit of human desires, hopes and dreams and concepts. Now, at this moment, at this point in the unfolding of the human endeavor, we see that this development has spawned the ability to concentrate our skills, perception, conceptualizing and behaving into clusters of capability, that is faculties, such that our intentfully guided discernments, knowing, discourses and practices elicit a vast catalogue of ways of living. We now are at the moment of pursuing the traces of the faintest, most distant and most immanently near dynamics that enable faculties to arise at all, that, in one sense, stand at the event horizon, the origin of the facultatively rendered world. Once we fully realize and accept that for humans it is this drive to guide our own processes of increasing complexity that is at stake, new issues open up that have to be taken into account, or, rather have to be incorporated into our account of the human endeavor. Most importantly, we have to elevate to a prominent position in that account just what it is that the aspiring mind entails. In view of our attempt to guide our own processes wherein and whereby we increase our own complexity, this aspiring impetus cannot be considered an incidental and occasional factor that interrupts our smooth going on our respective ways. Instead, it colors all that we do. If it is not taken into account in our daily activities, in our senses of who we are as individuals and as a species, the aspiring impetus does not merely go gently into the night, it does not quietly acquiesce to being put off to another day. To elide aspiration from our considerations about what is transpiring in our lives means that it has been stopped, foreclosed, been degraded and repressed. It still operates, mind you, but now it does so in the shadows, in a manner of haunting that sends up phantoms, signs of distress or outright illness. NEW WAYS. Once we acknowledge that aspiration marks every aspect of what this human endeavor undertakes, we have to consider ideas such facultative development. The aspiring drive to engage our milieus in more expansive and more encompassing ways means that the hierarchy that once demarcated most exalted and esteemed faculties are under assault, and like it or not, are being rearranged behind our backs. This kind of rearranging always cuts two ways. The drive of aspiration does affirm our living. It offers a concrete

way to envision a path forward for humanity; it places before our attention a way to continue the infinite task of engendering an endeavor in the cosmos that is specifically and definitively human. It points to an image of being human that reaches back to a primacy, of cosmic self-organization itself -- that connects us to the cosmos in an intimate way, a way even more intimate and immanent than the hand of God. Good. Hold on to that notion. But it also portends something else, which may be less palatable: it suggests a capability that, operating sub-Rosa and out of sight, changes everything we know, have ever known, will know or will have any desire to know as to what a human endeavor entails, whether we like it or not. This notion sings no praises to a god-given mission, provides no safe harbor on the way to a heavenly retreat, it professes no blinkered ameliorations of salvation. It leaves what we know of the human endeavor as such behind and undertakes a truly Nietzschean transvaluation of all values, and a true aufhebung of Spirit, in the Hegelian sense (holding it in a displaced and subsumed mode). The aspiring encompasses and embraces the great and cosmic symmetry breaking processes, like the universes big band and inflation and the first appearances of life, in which new forms emerge, seemingly without precedent; and, it encompasses notions of changes on smaller scales, that continually demand discerning, measuring and gauging so as to determine how, not whether, to respond. This notion makes incumbent upon us our giving way to the generativity of any and all occurrence; and this means the moving out of our complacency into our aspirations. In its most salient expressions (such as in those of the poets and philosophers we cite throughout this essay), we humans feel the intimate workings the self-organizing impetus to become more complex, which we understand as our aspiring minds, as it moves us away from the consolations of our beliefs toward that which invites (or insists on, even demands) a more expansive and more encompassing engagement with what occurs. We feel this impetus engendering wonder, surprise and disbelief. None of this is easy to take; and, as anyone who acts on their aspirations knows, we need to learn new ways of living in order to take up and act on this calling. How do we do that? THE STEP. Frankly, maybe sadly, it simply does not help us at all to approach our aspirations in classical or psychological ways. In order to approach our aspirations as our most salient and imposing impetus, it does not help us, for instance, to demean the irrational or the mad, or valorize only rational, positivistic, logical and mathematized pursuits. And neither does it help us to adopt a clinical or objective standpoint with regard

to our experiencing. To comprehend a notion such as aspiration requires a completely different manner of regarding our experiencing, one that stands such static and self-righteous orientations on its head. In a most preliminary and tentative way, aspiration forces us to give way to occurrences and shape our encounters to their contours and energies. This includes taking into account all the riches and coherence that Reason has wrought; but it also includes accounting for what occurs at the fringes of the experience, for what defies and destabilizes any and all certainty. And since these evocations are held as questions and problems, they are not imposed on the self or on others, and they do not instigate a lassitude or slackness in experiencing. But still, they do take their time; they do place the questioner in a state where knee-jerk reactions may not suffice, and yet what is occurring is of the most intimate and compelling nature and is compelling responses from moment to moment. And, what is even more pressing, no one who is undergoing the process of aspiring can have any idea of what is happening to him or her at that moment. Aspiration occurs as a stirring, a restlessness, a vague sense of being out of joint or dislocated somehow; it occurs viscerally, experientially, but behind the back of the aspirant, as Hegel puts it. This notion thus elicits a need for forbearance on the part of others, patience on everyones part, and a continual effort at composure for the experiencing one. The pace of resolution may vary from person to person; a person may be able to survey the field quickly, or instantaneously in certain situations; or the nature of what the person questions may require years of consideration, and everyday, functioning life has to go on in the meantime. The point remains, that a different value is put on experiencing. It is less a matter of end results that are considered, although these are valued; but also considered is the manner, depth, perspicacity and canniness with which a person evokes a larger sense of wholeness in his or her expression. It is not just a matter of the journey being the goal, as our clichs and promotions for energy drinks put it. It is a matter of coming face-to-face with how our lives are being changed by these aspirations and we have no idea what journey we are on. New languages, new ethics, new institutions and productive flows will be needed to encompass this wider field. And that is the promise and prospect this notion intends to set out, by considering a notion such as facultative development, for instance.

A New Discourse
Facultative development, in its most general expression, offers a way to set this forbearance, this taking time in the throes of ambiguity, into a process, a procedure, and most importantly, into a conversation (with a mentor). It offers a way to engage the exigencies imposed by the aspiring condition of the human endeavor methodically, articulately, and in the company of others. It opens attentive awareness onto dynamics and moments that aspiration has put into question, and it does so by delineating the processes by which aspirations are imbued with the qualities of structure and robustness that make them irrepressible. Facultative development envisions a new manner of inquiry, investigation, dialogue and accounting, one that encompasses aspirations themselves, that envisions the forming and shaping of those aspirations and the aspiring mind itself. Fac Dev entails a new vision of the scope of our psychic/somatic (P/SS) engagement with occurrences. Instead of laboring to craft representations of events that are held in fixed states of thinghood for our use and disposal, instead of ensaring what occurs in our experiencing in the deadness of captured frozenness, certainty and sameness, Fac Dev envision how the psyche seeks out the most moving, vital, changing, encompassing and affecting potencies, the ones that allow for the most generatively self-organizing forces that mark all vitality. Instead of a single, monomaniacal ego bent on wresting control from nature by means of its vaunted genius, this new realization encompasses a long series of singularizing cycles that enable and constitute at each step a being that encompasses and enfolds according to its (the system at that stage, the machine as far as it is able to operate) capacity to do so. THE PHILOSOPHICAL CORE. As one might imagine, Fac Dev is difficult to talk about in a preliminary way. There are three significant reasons for this. For one, in presenting the workings of aspiration, its objects or subject matter are never firmly established as certainties. Nothing guarantees that any aspiration, no matter how ardently felt, will engender the continuing viability of what is ventured in the spirit of becoming more complex. What we have here in the notion of self-organization, is a precept: a notion that can be articulated, that is worthy of our attention, and that spurs enough of a progressive momentum, beyond extermination, accumulative exclusion and power, beyond manipulatively entrancing captivation, that it merits more effort at elucidation, unfolding, comprehension and experimentation. What we can do is articulate

certain aspects of self-organization that we more or less continually encounter, and try to better understand these. That effort is what this work offers in the form of considering aspiration and facultative development. In our fondest hopes, by doing the work to articulate these forces we might increase the chances that an aspiration might emerge as a possibility, but no aspiration itself, no labor of Fac Dev can chart a cause-and-effect course of certifiability for what is being discussed or ventured. And, second, Fac Dev is difficult to discuss in a preliminary way because it cannot be put into packages of psychological behaviors, syndromes or advisements; its processes cannot be mapped with EMI scans. It deals with aspirations, with futures, with unformed anticipations, with sensibilities yet unmarked, no less knowable. It is a philosophical notion through and through, and a speculative one at that. Fac Dev is a notion that remains at the far-flung speculative end of philosophical reflection and articulation at its farthest horizon -- precisely because it is a notion that must have its concepts developed, must submit continually to the new regimes thereby opened, and these, once happened upon must reconceptualized and this according to notions that had not yet been in common circulation. It therefore constitutes a point of view, a perspective and entails an operation that pulls aspirations into a state of possibility, rather than delineates the already attained places in the landscapes of our knowledge, reason, logic and technical prowess. And so, as the third reason, when doing Fac Dev, whatever expressions are ventured must remain in a conceptually generative state, at the ready to actively reengage its constructive enterprise. What Fac Dev takes up is not held in a presence that is vouched safe as being real; instead, its notions are rendered into the mix of what is occurring, right on the spot, and absorbed, without judgment, as, simply, the occurrence, ore even more dramatically effecting as the event. The whole effort will drive and harvest a conceptuality that strains at the edges of language, and so performs less of a classical philosophical adjudication, than one that upsets, detaches and sets into motion all our settled categories and subjects them to re-conceptualizing at the very inception of what we are coming to know as true, certain and intuitively given. In Fac Dev that moment, place, configuration of state of affairs, of an event, where conceptualizing is literally called for, does not settle into knowledge, but instead stirs aspiration and drives the impetus to engage what occurs on a more expansive and more encompassing basis.6
6 See Deleuze, Logic of Sense (New York; 1990), pp. 166ff. But I also suggest that the kind of conversation and exploration that fulfills this condition is at hand, if we only take it up as a task for

THE CORE PROCESSES OF GENERATIVITY: SINGULARIZATION AND INDIVIDUATION This goes to the heart of the idea: it involves a reorientation to our psychic/somatic (P/SS: is the moniker I assign to our psychic/somatic system) modes of engaging occurrences. It is a matter of delineating complexity, which is already an imposing task; and it involves the delineation of multiple systems or machinic assemblages, each of which are sufficiently potent and formative in their own rights so as to command viable life streams, figurations and roles, each unto themselves and thus each of which operates in a manner which is all its own, completely separate and distinct from other processes. The point of commonness, the thread or the theme that runs through it all is the one of self-organizing: that out of the pure onwarding of our expanding cosmos, there is first a drive to singularize into stable, viable and abiding structures, ,thus resisting obliteration, and taking a place in what occurs; and then there is a further self-organizing impetus to individuate: that is, in an anticipatory manner, develop the capability to extend ones reach, and become more viable over a wider range of the occurrences dimensions and characteristics, and so endure at its locale. And then, finally, both of these movements enact the character of generativity: that complexity increases to the full extent of the health of the locale and the greater the powers of endurance, the greater the reach that can be effected to probe, accommodate and take up a place in ever wider dimensions of what occurs at that beings locale. We can even say this: Fac Dev dislocates our attention, moves our sense-making work out of the realms of the physical, biological and even the psychological spheres of organization. It is now taking up a place in a self-organizing regime we can only faintly discern. It does not yet offer a somatic, neural, incarnate, corporeal congelation, but is still in the regime of pure energy, or is still exerting its force through and over its lines of communications, its gap-bridging, its synapsing, (as a friend of mine said of generatively, productive conversations that result in new ideas, initiatives, excitements and commitments). And, since these communicating surges, pulses and tracing lines of force (rhizomes, says Deleuze/Guattari) are not yet congealed into brain specialties, or neural concentrations for instance, they cannot as yet be documented as phenomena suitable for psychological
development and study, and that is the mentoring conversation. I see this engagement as offering our entre into that third way, Blanchot seeks, and that new mode of friendship, that of destinerrance that Derrida calls for. It is also in line with what Derrida names as deconstruction, or others, more interpretively inclined call hermeneutics. The point being, this is not any longer a speculative or outlandish notion: the work is being done to put this orientation into practice.

research. What we have instead are the otherwise inexplicable behaviors and roles in which people engage; what we have to turn our reflection toward and accept is their strange, otherworldly, and non-negotiable commitments to life roles that must come from somewhere, but that we cannot pin down physically, neurologically, psychologically, biographically or certainly in terms of an ambition toward fame and/or fortune. We do take note of these behaviors, of course, because without a doubt they affect some of us, more or less, sooner or later, and so change things that once seemed certain, common place, matters of common sense and infinite and eternal wisdom into complexes of experiencing (from products to new modes of commerce, to new concepts and whole new avenues of thinking). Thus undertaking this enterprise of engaging in Fac Dev is a matter of accompanying an emergence our own or that of another person -- that might or might not someday coalesce human potencies and capabilities differently than we had imagined possible, encourage and nurture hitherto unforeseen and unforeseeable paths. THE MULTI-FRONTED CRITIQUE OF REASON. If there is one notion I would want the reader to take away from this work it is this: of late, the classical, Reason-bound ego/ cogito/self/subject, and its stepchild consciousness, that has dominated our discourses scientific, clinical, therapeutic and colloquial has been placed under withering critical gazes, from many directions and perspectives. There is the front of artistic spontaneity: any artist would tell you that the thinking, rationalizing ego has to be left behind so that creativity can emerge. And, even more than that, the one who chooses the artists life way (including athletes, scientists, mathematicians and others) had to become something else, something strong and capable, but something besides an ego-cogito, in order to do work. Prophets such as philosophers, or mystics, would tell you that they had to aspire to arrive at their insights, intuitions, visions and concepts; in order to discern and then express these glimpses into their experiencing, they had to reach out of the ego-cogitos formed constructs, and even place themselves in conflict with all the ego-cogitos needs, opinions and habits in order to do their work. 7 The resurgence of the ideas of the great mystics, from Marguerite
See my works in progress: Mentoring The Artist: In the Workshop of Facultative Development ; Mystics Among Us: Into the Open; and Prophets: The Nomadic Mind at Work (available on request). The leader figure is somewhat anomalous in this regard, as this figure largely accepts what the Ego Structure presents, and takes that energy into a mode of working on its world. That world, to be sure is a component of sub-assemblage of the Ego Structure, as we will see in Part Three, but is still held as what is engaged. To be sure, in the case of leaders, those who engage their worlds such that it intimately and profoundly affects and transforms on the leaders other egoic assemblages (the Sense-Making Field and Egoic Transducing Array) are the ones who we call great leaders. But the issues, energies, transversals and anomalous thoughts that affect the other figures do not exert primary affects on the leader. The leaders work is egoic to the core.
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Porete to Meister Eckhart (most prominently) and Silesius and Boehme (Eckhart disciples) testify to our growing empathy with their extra-psychological aspirations. Those who heeded their calls, figures such as Hegel, Hlderlin, Schelling, Nietzsche, Heidegger Deleuze, Levinas and Derrida8 have contributed seminally to the critique that countenances aspiration as a necessary, precursory and even ultimately formative potency in the human endeavor. The question we explore in this essay takes up this critique. In no way is it my intent, nor do I consider it possible or even desirable to extinguish and expunge the ego-centric model, but, rather my concern is to get us back on the trajectory this resource once offered as a way to enact and practically undertake the mission of guiding our own individuation, of acting on and in service to our aspirations. I ask: how do we restore our P/SS resources, including our ego structure, to their roles as being a moments in the enactment of anticipatory aspiration, and thereby become a generative force from which we open, expand and enrich the human endeavor? To do this, I suggest that we need to envision an intervening dimension in our P/SS operations, one that takes place prior to our psychological patterning of what we experience, and one that operates according to different principles. These principles are the machinics of P/SS individuation singularization. These machinic operations form assemblages iteratively engage occurrences in such a way that the P/SS takes up a place in its milieu in a mode of attunement to the generative potencies of that site, and so also demand of those machinics that they remain open to more expansive and more encompassing engagements to come. It is these machinic operations that aspiration comprises and facultative development articulates. It is these machinic operations of the aspiring mind that generate the psychological mechanics of our behaving. What happens in this post-classical view, we might say, is that by considering pre-conscious machinics as viable operations we can articulate and address, we can guide the formation of those behaviors, actions, speech and decisions. And, we can do this because we are no longer constrained by the classically conceived faculties that constitute a supposed firm and inalterable, god-given human nature. Instead we can take up the joyous, if arduous, work of forming the faculties that are summoned to the scene, from moment to moment, as the vehicles that bear our aspirations. Thus, a faculty names a
8 Several works of John D. Caputo make this clear in a sweeping and persuasive way. See, for instance, The Mystic Elements in Heideggers Thought (New York; 1986) and The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (Bloomington, IN; 1997).

capacity of a multi-faceted, complex machinic assemblage, that actively and in an anticipatory manner discerns and differentiates generative potencies at work in an occurrence, and with the materials from this discerning actively anticipates and construct viable psychic/somatic experiments, ventures and chance-taking actions so that a viable, structured, intelligible and thus iteratively improvable mode of engaging with that occurrence, can be self-organized, in new, unforeseen, more expansive and more encompassing ways. Armed with this notion, my supposition goes, we can select from the machinic elements in play at the site of the occurrence; we can prioritize and sequence their role in P/SS construction; and so we can develop the faculty we choose to venture, in that moment, in order to engage in the most expansive and encompassing manner we can muster.

The Aspiring Mindset

And so, in place of this frayed and worn notion of natural faculties and psychological necessities, new thinking across many disciplines is generating a different more expansive and more encompassing -- sense of how the human endeavor engages occurrences. Scientific paradigms such as self-organization, abetted by new physics and neuroanatomy are taking hold. Genetic cartography, self-organizing infant and child behavioral development and new non-anthropocentric notions of the human story are opening new comprehensions of how the mind aspires to new generative states of being. And new ways of engaging in conceptual discourses ways that embrace these sciences, as well as poetry, literature, history and mythology are articulating concepts that far exceed the classical categories of mechanistic understanding. Our notion of Fac Dev interprets and concentrates these immensely diverse and dynamic discourses into one stream of narration. The account of Fac Dev envisions the human as being a still (at least potentially) lively and generative organism, one that is at least capable of great perspicacity and a vast range of activities, all of which are in constant communication with larger cosmic forces. At its best, the human endeavor exhibits an extraordinary ability to affect its own constitution of viable behaviors and orientations to what occurs in its milieu. How does it do this? The aspiring mind and the body that enacts it, the human P/SS makes it possible. The amazing human organism comprises a series of constellated processes (gathered or captured into machinic assemblages), each with its own character, range and limits of production, response and communicative reach, each of which

germinates from the most generalized singularizing constellating processes, and then find ways to integrate, join up with, combine and relate (conjunctively or disjunctively) to other processes that eventually constitute viable and individual beings (some of which are human), of incredible, always infinite variety, up to and including the emergence of an engaging, acting, speaking humans. Nested deeply, minutely and highly derivatively within this functioning personhood an ego pulses but it does so in a much more limited way than classically envisioned, and it does so at the behest of and in the context of many other processes that have long ago passed on their work to successive stages of realization. The Ego Structure, it turns out is a Johnnycome-lately and highly derivative structure that arises at the end of long chains of other constellating and constituting and configuring processes; and, we might add, at the end (so far) of a long process of evolutionary self-organizing experimentation. And, at no point are any of these stages stable, emblematic or productive of the truth, or complete. Each stage, moment/complex, series and system is affected, at some level, to some degree and in some way by vast extra-organic potencies, and by each other. Each stage thus has to regenerate, in terms of both extreme novelty engendered by a milieu and environment, and in terms of the health and robustness of the processes in play and in terms of the vivacity of the communications that transpire between them. Indeed, in our model, it is these flights of communications, these channels, fields, plateaus, rhizomes and tendrils that reach out in all directions to other dimensions of formation and singularization that matter the most to us. Fac Dev is thus an orientation of what continual and incessant living entails of a changing and generative organism, in all its varied potencies. And so, in the end, the ego/self is a tenuous, continually shifting construction. At best, it is an assemblage of highly refined and worked-over factors that need to be put to use in and by the organism, in its highly developed and increasingly isolated (from other organisms milieus) environment. All these living, squirming, acting and desiring potencies have to coalesce into a being that lives on the terms that render it viable, among others. And so, with self-organizing processes of its own, at its own level and in its own sphere of operation, the ego does its work of putting a being out there as an agent in this vast and teeming world of potencies, energies, factors, machines and interactions. The ego definitely has its role, and an indispensible one. FACULTY AND THE EGO STRUCTURE. Indeed, by focusing on the notions of

faculty, we are not only conceding a great deal to this last straw of the construction of the human organism, we are taking a position that embraces facultative capability as the most vital, active and generative element of the egoic structure. Why do I do this? There is both an historical reason for doing so and a practical reason, as well. On the historical level, on the level of the way the human endeavor has taken shape, we must think in terms of faculties because we are inheritors of the work of our precursors and predecessors. This includes proto-artists, people from pre-history that we can never name, but also prophets many of whom we can name: from Abraham, to Isaiah and Jeremiah, to Plato, Artistotle, Paul and Augustine, Meister Eckhart, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant and Hegel, Schelling, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, no less Freud and Husserl. We base our notions of our lives based on venerable but aging ego-cogito constructions, from Law to Reason to Truth and Knowledge, to Will and Power these people bequeathed to us. And, accordingly, to the extent that we are agents in the human endeavor, we, especially in the West, we, the People of the Book and the Enlightenment, are facultative beings. Faculties as conceived of here, are the desiring machines, to use Deleuze/Guattaris language, of the human endeavor, when it is considered in its own right. They are the most pliable, unformed and yet actively forming aspect of the Ego Structure, as we reconceive it that aspect most susceptible to expansive and ever-opening cosmic potencies. And they also bear with them the stamps of all of the information-forming accomplishments we bring to our experience, and from which we derive our knowledge. They are the salient, the entry point, and the cutting edge of what humans can muster for encountering what occurs. But, then again, in another sense, in a stronger one than that which retains a notion of ego as any kind of center, the narrative approaches the notion of Fac Dev from a direction which is counter-egoic: we are not considering parental, ancestral or biographical notions as being constitutive of facultative capability. In this account, faculties develop are made proficient, are placed in relations with one another relations of conjunctive, disjunctive and conflictual and neutral or indifferent types on the basis of self-organizing dynamics that reach from out of the deepest beginnings of occurrence to the most pressing of presents, from the most indifferent and blindly affecting potencies to the most minutely and specifically affecting emotions of the moment. As such, a facultative approach gives us a window on how the aspiring minds of our leaders, artists, prophets and mystics take shape (into what I call mindsets), and

accordingly, conduct themselves according to life ways that are uniquely individual and so offer us new avenues for our own singularization and development. The facultative approach allows us to segment certain trends and emphases that we can discern in these peoples life ways so that we can serve them as mentors: that is we can comprehend, at some level, how their worlds appear to them, we can speak into these worlds, and act as agents of nurturing and encouragement for their strange and possibility generating aspirations. And so, the point we make here is not that the ego is a falsehood, but that in so many ways we are ready to expand our understanding of its role in specifically humanly generative activity. To do so is its necessary to perform something akin to another Copernican Revolution (or maybe to continue to conduct the one initiated by Kant), to disqualify the ego as the predominant factor of psychic life, on the one hand, and, on the other (in ways that differ from Freud, but carry forward the effort to personify them) far more fully touch upon, appreciate and embrace the other modes, dimensions, moments and systems that enable the ego to come to a conclusive, decisive, expressible construction that is capable of viable action. And with this understanding, we can live with egoic constructions in a different way. We can see them as fleeting certainties, or worthy experiments, or locally effective and affecting truths, and in all the partiality, mobility and variation that living occurrence throws up at us. And we can then strongly situate ourselves in this flow, for our own moment, in our own way, while still feeling that in which we are merely a part.

Our Schema: The Aspiring Mind Considered as The Individuating Impetus toward Greater Complexity
I map out this task through schemas or diagrams, in order to elaborate the way our P/SS individuates, that is the way it increases its own complexity, that is aspires. It highlights those moments of P/SS engagement and self-organization in which human individuating singularization transpires such that each of us takes a place in our milieus in ways that always press onward, venture, reach and grope into hitherto unexplored dimensions or realms of occurrence, for no other reason but that, in accord with the potencies at play at the site of our living, greater complexity, greater generativity can be accommodated, taken up, expressed and can then take its hard-won place. It offers a diagram of a schema of P/SS machinics that drive the formation of capabilities, faculties, that enable us to approach our engagements in our milieus, that enable us to live in ways that are more expansive and more

encompassing; that concretely develop the discernments, sensibilities and new complexes of engagement that include ever-wider dimensions of occurrence, and so include in these engagement the reaching, groping, venturing and anticipatory states of being that aspire, from moment to moment. By offering this diagrammatic schema we can join in the efforts of so many others who seek to restore the vitality of the human endeavor. It is by means of this schema that I offer a contribution, and show a way by means of which a process such as Fac Dev might be undertaken. The criteria by which we have proceeded would be required in any application in which Fac Dev is envisioned. They are thus worth enumerating at the outset of our work: Construct a narrative based solely on the dynamics of Self-Organization, Singularization and Individuation. That is, construct a narrative that does not presume the existence of a functioning egoically motivated and capable being that has its modus operandi prescribed as it ventures into a milieu in order to find its place. The only dynamic I rely on is that of singularizing: the searching out and groping and reaching in order taking of a place in an opening dimension or milieu; and, then its successor and amplifying mode (but not separate or independent of singularizing), that of individuating: the impetus to render that taking of (a) place more robust and enduring by expanding the compass of its engagement and encompassing more diverse aspects or dimensions of the site of singularizing. Demarcate psychic/somatic functions in generative ways, so as to articulate their self-organizing machinics. Our process begins with raw and simple singularization. As individuating begins to take assert itself, I specify that an Arteous mode of psychic/somatic engagements takes shape. In that individuating impetus, imagations (a neologism that points to concatenations of energies gathered and sent forth as the works of artists) generate a field that expands and opens the reach of psychic/somatic engagement; and then, an intensifying sense of a self, a new mode of machinics form, in the shape of an orbitally constellating Selfing Pole assemblage (a different rendering of what has partially been noted as an unconscious and even a collective unconscious in psychology). And so we will be describing new formations in the ego itself which we call an Ego Structure. This has subassemblages Sense-Making Field, Egoic Transducing Array and World -- that enable facultative differentiation of occurrences and individuated engagements of those occurrences. We can clear some space for a new view of the Ego Structure and thereby open

up a region of limited, specific activities that only this structure performs. The Ego Structure solves a specific problem: how to organize our P/SS engagement in such a way as to keep aspiration and its anticipating impetus in the mix. Whereas the Arteous solved a problem of how to express what is discerned as the human endeavor to singularize in any milieu on its own terms, the Ego Structure organizes into a machinic assemblage processes that strengthen individuation. Its machinics allow for the iterative streaming, juxtaposing of possibilities and forming of factors that will become aspects of our conscious and engaging experiencing. The Ego Structure puts into play new forms of worlding by operating as an image-generating field (producing an iconic imago) that gives rise to defining and determining locales for engagement entities, things, forces, language and conceptions, etc., all of which make authorized engagements possible. Identify and differentiate characterizing complexes assemblages and their machinics -- in their specificity. Our point here: the P/SS is not monolithically productive entity, but is rather a gathering of highly differentiated assemblages, each of which has its own mode of operation, its own productions and its own way of being a generatively selforganizing complex. These structures include the ways that the irremissible drive of a singularizing being to take its place in its milieu in the human fold: that is Intention, Will and Value. These also structures include notions that pertain most saliently to effecting the potency of individuation, those of Desire, Concept and Imagination. Delineate how at each site of singularizing and in each instance of individuation, potencies and forces exceed the organizing that is transpiring, giving rise to irreducible and always exceeding transversals. Transversals, especially those of thought and language, comprise the larger potencies of the always expanding and onwarding cosmic milieu and that resist any constellation, construction or representation the human way of individuating can encompass. Transversals are not merely external forces that act on a P/SS, however. They are also potencies that have been gathered up in the very act of singularizing, and are thus constituent to and composing of any singularizing moment/complex that is assembled so as to individuate. As such these transversals inaugurate and abet the drive toward becoming a more expansive and encompassing being right into the very fiber of the human way: they renders us an aspiring beings, despite ourselves. The transversals of thought and language fall outside of the logic of machinics that we schematize as being proper to the individuating singularizing that the P/SS enacts. They

are, nevertheless, critical aspects of what the human mode of individuation takes up in its aspiring way. They are thus crucial elements in any account of the Fac Dev processes we need to understand. These two transversals are therefore taken up is some specificity, at least as regards their roles in aspiration and Fac Dev in two appendices to the main body of the presentation. Depict categories of dynamics that pertain specifically to the minds of aspiring figures and to what a conversant or mentor must address in regard to that mindset. And, also, our intention is not to make the status quo safe for all time, but to provide a format of comprehending that welcomes the aspirations of those who reach beyond the structures that are authorized for our use. While such a description of breakout creative aspirations is infinitely complex, we are guided by those aspects that are most important to envision in a Fac Dev process of mentoring those aspirations into healthy, robust and sustainably affecting life ways.