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Some objections with which i closed my last notes document on this chapter: 

Re: False Conciousness

{is it contrary to these things? i don’t see that it necessarily is

{should we value these ends of freedom, self knowledge, right humaness in particular? i’m not sure that we should

{doesn’t it denaturalize the multiples and naturalizes the singletons? 

{how do people become singletons in the first place

{who will speak for our nightmare selves?

some corrections and {reminders to insure future clarity accuracy}

ஃ the 18th chapter is about false consciousness, which is not directly reducible nor coterminious with multiplicity. 

ஃ multiplicity is however linked to false consciousness and its derrogation via the following formula:

cautious skeptics conservative? critics of the multiple movement who try to help patients who have been poorly served towards false memories, less concerned about what is real, rather, concern about alters as a stepstone towards belief in abuse?

they accept the patient produced this version of herself, a narrative with dramatic events, cauusal story, account of relationships between alters. a self consciousness, a soul. they respect the clinicians who can ease pain and help them function 266 but they fear it leads to false consciousness,; the memories might be true, but rather that the end product is a thoroughly crafted person, but not a person who serves the ends for which we are persons. not a person with self knowledge, but a person who is worse for having a glib patter that simulates an understanding of herself. … retroactive narrative in which the patient gendered femenine was the weak vessel

ஃ that is to say that the issue with false consciousness is neither inaccurate memories/wrong forgetting/repression nor multiplicity per se but something between, closely connected to suppression and tied up, or so it seems to my reading, with multiplicity qua artiface. 

ஃ there is something of the … …. … critique of religion here, religion or multiplicity as cultivated in the clinic which serves as a camera obscura, an ideology which relates the subject to herself and to the world by means of a self-cloaking mechanism dwhich hinders the intracourse of self knowledge, experience, memory, critique, development, …

ஃ 

in Hacking’s representation of multiplicity we are encouraged to view it as a deviation, something which is perhaps over determined/over constructed att he behest of a multiple movement which Hacking is sympathetic to, sure, but not particularly interested in learning from, especially when it comes to the very fields he is situated as an expert over. multiples are no special problem”, they present no problem re the mind and body, and it is rather that the multiples need to learn from basic “gramatical” analytic philosophy lest they fall prey to the (gendered fem) dynamic of the weak vessel fitting itself around/being molded by the clinic

ஃ 

a congress of selves which concenes and recesses itself, develops over time, real time historical particular time, political time, which precedes the clinic — or for that matter can’t get into the clinic in the first place — this too there isn’t a place for , and hacking’s critique of the ready made and handicapped version of multiplicity is almost unwilling to be mapped onto, and vice versa

ஃ

there is not much room for a discussion of multiplicity beyond memory, though hacking does acknowledge in his discussions of prototypes that not everyone experiences multiplicity as break ups in memory, but may be more (ontological?) phenomenological? …

ஃ

there is something in the moral/psychological naturalizing of the singleton model which is also epistemicological . that is, this virtuous aristotelian-modern-existential self knowledge which hacking prizes and which he doubts (certain) multiples can enjoy is assumed to be (more) accessible in the singleton model.

this is surprising to me because when i’ve been most singleton, most alone with my own univocal thoughts, i’ve had much less insight into myself, the specific ways memories and expectations play themselves out in my desires, the resonances between actins and thoughts and beings now and elsewhen…

my experience is anecdotal, but it does pose a kind of conceptual problem ot lhacking’s assumptions that singleton metaphysics entails (the possibility of) a more direct self-relationship. sure, maybe for some people, but in other cases, my own case, that is, a case which even now is working itself out in a mental symposium of conflicting and colaborating and self-contradicting signals, self-knowledge haas entirely opposite demands.

ஃ here perhaps we enter a problem of good multiple/bad multiple, but  on what grounds would this line be drawn? artiface? but we are all artificial and we are all natural, there is no pure natural human self, or if there is it is a platonic pree-linguistic speculation which the contemporary singleton can only ape. the specific contagion of the clinic? well i am a product of the clinic, and so is the concept of the singleton self defined in opposition to the bad multiple. we are all of us born and birthing each other on the freudian’s couch and have been for some hundred years now. is the good multiple the one who is in self-harmonyy, where all selves are present at once? i don’t know that i’ve ever been in that state, nor do i necessarily think that drawing closer to it comes with any guarantee of a higher degree of functionality, or even self-knowledge given that psychic-existential crises are marked by ignorance, doubt, but also certainty in premises which under other conpsycholations are revealed to be absurd (which is not to say Un-True).  

ஃ how do people become singletons for that matter?

i don’t necessarily think that most people are singletons, see the radical “we are all multiple” crowd  (pg 17), popular discourse of the Two wolves, Whitman’s contained multitudes, the devil and angel, Hegel’s split consciousness, plato’s tripart soul, even the Holy Trinity when combined with the concept of man as image of God suggests internal multiplicity. 

this you are one person who always knows who you are is a strawmaan, Hacking himself acknowledges that self-knowledge is an ongoing and never complete or perfect (or at least, usually fraught) project means that the singleton-as-norm model is not identified with self-knowledge, but merely supposed to be a precondition for it, by relative degree of strangeness to the more florid cases multiplicity, dissociation, missing time, et cetera

there’s a strong possibility that the singleton model is related to the individualism of neoliberalism, which is not to say that before reagan and thatcher we were all multiples per se, but reference-subject (individual as a person enmeshed in and constituted by relationships, practical relationship like worker, child, parent, student, teacher, speaker, listener, etc) lends itself to different starting schema from “individual”, with its cartesian solipsism and self=theorizing in a laboratory sealed off from the rest of the world and therefore regarded as free of contagion but equally barren of counter-reference, its own history and economy with the outside world not so much negated as obscured. 

ஃ

what if the soul of everyone has entered occlusion, and this singleton model is a self-delusionary effort to reach certainty but which tragically only encertains that self-examination is all the more buried, the wires of every faculty cut off from their ground. what if the soul has short circuited and can only empty its battery back into itself and call that actualization?

ஃ

i dont think hacking does a very good job of defining the position of multiplicity and its naturalized disconstituents (the singleton, self-knowledge). the problem might have some truth to it, but i don’t know what that truth might be or how it relates to its internal and external parts, to the flows which its participation in is constitituative of its being, and i dont know how the pursuit of his problem can be carried out or even if it is worth making this exploration given how self-defeating so many of his assumptions appear to be.