The Transcendental Positionality of Experience?

[ please note: this is only a draft fragment of a work-in-progress]

Part 1 / Transcendental Positionality [0]

Žižek is correct about the formal structure of the “I am” in the intelligibility of the universe. Without situated experience there can be no formal appeal to the Other, and no logical grounds upon which we can say that we know anything at all. Awareness is always already situated: a perception from a particular position within a terrain of possible perspectives. That is, the “transcendental subject” cannot be explained away without giving up all claims to knowledge.

1.1 - Framing the Transcendental

Transcendental philosophy includes approaches that describe the fundamental structures of being, not as an ontology (which is a description or theory of being and its forms), but as the framework of validation of the very knowledge of being - what Immanuel Kant argued as the conditions of possibility for human knowledge. In seeking the transcendental conditions of knowledge previous to (a priori) any experience traditional metaphysics is converted to epistemology. Through such framings transcendentalism prioritizes the conception of being (thought) over the presence of beings (world) which describing experience.  

1.2 - Maintaining the Transcendental in the Empirical

Why must the transcendental positionality of experience be an ontologically distinct “subject” at all? Is it not the empirical case that our locus of awareness is an 'objective' cognizing body? In fact, the embodied cognitive action of sapient material assemblages can be indexed directly to the "phenomenological auto-affection of the flesh" while maintaining arguments for the transcendental positionality of experience. Despite the phantasmal extension of phenomenological awareness and experience via synthetic symbolic association and projection the empirical subject is the locus of perception out of sensation.

From Joseph Carew:

“Although phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty and more recently Michel Henry and Jean-Luc Marion argue for the primordial unity of consciousness and the lived body or the self's immanent auto-determination from the unfolding of givenness of the flesh (which indicates the disappearance of a radical subject-object distinction by the interpenetration of both in embodiment), Žižek makes the claim that such descriptions are intrinsically lacking insofar as they fail to take account of the experience of the monstrous and the traumatic irrevocably tied to the essence of human being. One cannot merely replace classical subjectivity with a more organic theory of experience that intertwines consciousness with a phenomenological auto-affection of the flesh…

Arguing against postmodern theorists like Derrida and Foucault, who claim that the subject itself is merely an empty, accidental construction that arises out of the flux of historical experience, Žižek contends that by forgetting the ontological schism between mind and body that enables the self to be determined according to linguistic and political forces in the first place, they lose sight of the very formal structure of the I that is required even to speak of the endless temporal variations of selfhood within the contingent upsurge of sociocultural activity. The unceasing play of cultural difference, the non-finite proliferation of identities and discourses, can only be adequately understood through the transcendental framework offered by Cartesian subjectivity because, as that which prevents human activity from being explicable through solely natural or biological grounds, it supplies the formal-universal structure through which such change is rendered possible. [source]

Žižek and others are correct: individuality must be accounted for and reckoned - as our creaturely capacity for differentiating awareness is a 'transcendental' feature of intelligibility. However, there are so many different ways we can frame and understand how such an awareness can be achieved, and the most credible among them do not involve Descartes and Žižek's massive errors.

From actualizing the Cartesian fantasy of an “ontological schism” between experience and physicality, or mind and body, knowing hominid bodies enact degrees of operational individuality, or "agency", via the emergent operational capacities of neurologically instantiated experience and complex gross materiality via a system of combinatorial auto-affective expression - or what we can refer to as empirical existenz. The objective matrix of human existenz is thus an immanent achievement of a capacity for positional awareness (sentience) and elaborate cognition (sapience) organically generated by an dynamic ecology of potent assemblages and flows.