Сергей Гладков – The Subject as a Process of Stabilizing Experience (страница 4)

Maintaining is also not a purely conscious act. A significant part of this work takes place before explicit reflection or outside it. Bodily orientation, affective background, habits of attention, implicit memory, and social expectations already structure what can later be called "my" experience. Bodily approaches to consciousness show that self-experience is connected not only with thought, but also with organismic regulation, emotion, and the feeling of what happens (Damasio, 1999). For the minimal model, this means that the subject cannot be identified with a conscious commentary on experience.

Maintaining is not the simple preservation of the past either. It includes selection, reconstruction, and the redistribution of significance. Memory does not simply supply material for identity; it participates in how the past becomes part of the present. Language does not simply describe an already finished experience; it helps to distinguish and connect it. Meaning is not simply added to events; it determines which events enter the structure of life as significant. Maintaining coherence is therefore always a dynamic process.

What "Coherence" Means

The coherence of experience is not the same as inner unity without contradiction. If coherence is understood as complete non-contradiction, the model immediately becomes implausible: human experience almost always contains divergences among desire, action, self-description, bodily reaction, and social role. Coherence means not the absence of divergences, but the possibility of connecting them within some structure.

Minimal coherence exists where elements of experience do not disintegrate into completely unconnectable fragments. A person may say: "I do not understand why I react this way," and this sentence already maintains a connection among the reaction, the question, memory, and the attempt at self-description. One may acknowledge a contradiction: "I want this and at the same time I am afraid of it." Such acknowledgment does not eliminate the divergence, but it makes it part of experience that can be organized.

Coherence has several levels. At the bodily level, it appears in orientation, tension, readiness for action, and the sense of presence. At the affective level, it appears in stable emotional evaluations. At the cognitive level, it appears in expectations, distinctions, and explanations. At the narrative level, it appears in the capacity to include events in a history. At the social level, it appears in recognition, role, name, responsibility, and communication. The distinction between minimal and narrative selfhood shows that subjectivity is not exhausted by a single level of self-description (Gallagher, 2000).

These levels may fail to coincide. A person may assert one thing in language, react differently bodily, return through memory to a third thing, and socially perform a fourth role. Coherence therefore should not be understood as a pre-given order. It is a task of organization. The subject function consists not in eliminating all divergences, but in maintaining them in a form available for further distinction, action, and reconfiguration.

Experience as the Object of Stabilization

The minimal model of the subject is impossible without clarifying what exactly is stabilized. What is stabilized is not "consciousness" in a narrow sense and not only a stream of thoughts. What is stabilized is experience as a multilevel field: bodily sensations, emotions, perceptions, memory, expectations, actions, language, social relations, traces of the past, and external supports. If experience is limited only to conscious content, the subject is once again mistakenly placed in the domain of inner observation.

Experience is not passive material that then receives form from a ready-made subject. Rather, the subject function arises within the organization of experience itself. An experience becomes "mine" not because it has been appropriated by an inner owner, but because it is included in a system of relations: with the body, memory, attention, language, action, and history. These relations are what make it possible to distinguish what is merely happening from what is happening to me.

This understanding brings the minimal model close to lines of embodied and enactive cognition, where cognition is not separated from body, action, and environment (Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991). Yet what matters here is not to transfer another theoretical framework in its entirety, but to fix a basic constraint: the subject should not be described as an isolated inner point. Its function is distributed across processes of organizing experience, some of which are bodily, some linguistic, some social, and some connected with external structures.

It follows from this that the subject cannot be sought in one place. It does not coincide only with the brain, only with narrative, only with the body, only with language, or only with the self-model. Each of these levels may participate in maintaining coherence, but none of them exhausts the subject function. The minimal model remains minimal precisely because it does not turn one mechanism into the complete essence of the subject.

The Subject as a Process, Not an Object

A processual understanding of the subject requires caution: the word "process" too may quietly become a new name for an entity. To prevent this, process must be understood operationally. It does not exist separately from the operations through which experience is maintained as connected. There is no subject over and above attention, memory, bodily orientation, language, action, and self-reference. But there is a certain organization of these processes through which the subject function arises.

A process differs from an object in that it is not preserved as a ready-made thing through change. It is maintained, disrupted, resumed, weakened, strengthened, and reconfigured. A musical performance exists only while it is being performed; a conversation exists only while an exchange is being maintained; equilibrium exists only while a system compensates for deviations. In a similar way, the subject exists not as a thing behind experience, but as a maintained organization of experience.

This example is not a proof, but it helps clarify the type of explanation. If the subject is processual, then the question of its identity is not solved by searching for an unchanging core. It is solved through an analysis of modes of continuation. What allows a person to recognize oneself through change? What connects past and present? What makes an action part of one's own history? What makes it possible to distinguish an impulse, accept it, or reject it? These questions point to processes of stabilization, not to a hidden owner.

A processual understanding also allows for weak, disrupted, and conflictual forms of subjectivity. If the subject were a fixed entity, fragmentation would look like falling out of subjectivity or the breakdown of a center. If the subject is a process of maintaining coherence, then fragmentation becomes a change in the mode of organization. The subject function may weaken, narrow, rely on external structures, require the restoration of connections, or move toward reconfiguration.

The Minimality of the Model

The model is called minimal because it does not add explanatory elements beyond what is necessary. It does not assert a hidden observer, an unchanging I, a special inner substance, or a metaphysical bearer of experience. It preserves only the function that has to be explained: maintaining the coherence of experience. Everything else should be introduced only when a specific mechanism cannot be described without it.

Minimality does not mean poverty of description. On the contrary, it opens space for more precise analysis. Once the fixed center has been removed, it becomes clearer which processes actually work: attention distributes significance, memory connects the present with the past, language shapes distinctions, the body provides the background of presence and action, social relations support recognition, and external structures help maintain traces and obligations. These processes do not have to be reduced to one center in order to perform the subject function together.

Minimality also protects the model from excessive claims. From the claim that the subject is understood as a process of maintaining the coherence of experience, no ready-made neurobiological theory follows. No clinical protocol follows. No theory of physical time follows. No metaphysics of an immortal self follows. The formula sets a framework for analysis, not a completed system of explanations.

This principle is consistent with the critique of a substantial understanding of the self, but it preserves its own focus. Self-model theory emphasizes structures of modeling (Metzinger, 2003). The distinction among levels of selfhood emphasizes the heterogeneity of subjectivity (Gallagher, 2000). Embodied and enactive cognition point to the connection of cognition with body, action, and environment (Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991). The minimal model of the subject uses these lines as constraints and contexts, but formulates its own center of gravity: the coherence of experience.