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A fairly recent study to verify the existence of non-conscious effects in the brain entailed a subject being flashed with a fearful face so quickly (33 milliseconds) that it could not be consciously registered. Yet, as caught on a high res MRI, the face had an observable effect - causing anxiety in the test subject. Similar to Benjamin Libet’s studies and others which have verified his findings, it appears that the unconscious or subconscious or non-conscious, registers and causes effects prior to conscious thought.
In their text Biology of Freedom: Neural Plasticity and the Unconscious, Francois Ansermet and Pierre Magistretti differentiate between the unconscious and the non-conscious. For Ansermet, the non-conscious is procedural whereas the unconscious is the fantasy trace of experience which, like the coincidence of simultaneously fired post-synapses, glaciates multiple signifiers in ways that are further and further from the signified.
Shifting to the latest volume of Collapse the question arises: are the un-seemingly un-formed oozes and horrors of the universe simply the formed horrors but at a faster pace? Is this the divide between Terror of horror versus the lurk of horror? Could the horrifying event, slowed down, been taken from the unconscious and put into the conscious - would this be the forbidden knowledge of Lovecraft’s Cthulu mythos?
At the beginning of Lovecraft’s Call of the Cthulu he writes:
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
Yet the reactions to ‘godless’ science seems to be more of a mixed bag of reactionary strategies: new age obscurantism, the theological term in philosophy, and, of course, the rampancy of the correlationist impulse. Houllebecq quotes Lovecraft on his cosmicism:
“The sky will become icy and void, pierced by the feeble light of half-dead stars. Which will also disappear. Everything will disappear. And what human beings do is just as free of sense as the free motion of elementary particles. Good, evil, morality, feelings? Pure ‘Victorian fictions’. Only egotism exists.”
While Meillassoux does not engage Lovecraft directly in Collapse IV, it seems that After Finitude has much in common with the foremer’s cosmicism - that humans are simply insects that supplant their idealism on the cosmos. Lovecraft’s cosmicism, as different from nihilism, is, instead of a complete meaninglessness, a great leveling of meaning and the aforementioned egotism, no doubt, finds a comfortable home in correlationism. Horror then, is beyond our individual fragility and is about a trace in humanity’s fragility itself where terror is immediately effecting our egotism. It is obvious then that, for terror, it is more than often death whereas for horror it is insanity.
The tipping point here is that of the figure of the last girl or the sole survivor, which I’ve previously discussed. That is, once the terror is over, the last girl lives to carry on the trauma of what happened. While this seems out of the realm of the terrible it does not qualify for the realm of the horrible.
Put most directly: terror is not knowing, horror is knowing too much. However, there is a level of cross over. The horror, in the realm of terror, is the discovery of the body, it is the knowing too much which leads back to not knowing (in relation to the self) hence ‘am I next?’ The terror of horror, is the sight of the thing which cannot be definately described. As I discussed previously in terms of trauma, the figure of the serial killer moves from the full trauma (the human caused creation of the killer) to the result of the empty trauma, the lone survivor who was chosen, at least in the best slashers, arbitrarily.
In terms of trauma, horror moves in the opposite direction, the pointless existence of horrible things, not caused by humans, generate full traumas - causing complex networks of insanity in the victims - a mythos. In the case of terror - the person survives to tell the story for the benefit of others and themselves - in horror the story is hidden and buried, no one benefits from it.
The question then is what of films which display the genesis of what could become the horrible? That is monster movies in which the birth of the monster, or monsters, is obfuscated by the film’s end - that there may or may not be anyone left to tell the unbelievable tale. We are more used to monster tales being public whether massively (Cloverfield, Godzilla films, King Kong films, War of the Worlds and its imitators, Romero’s zombie films and the like) or more locally (vampires, werewolves, witches et cetera). Two of the examples that stick out here are Neil Marshall’s The Descent, which I discussed at length here and John Carpenter’s The Thing. These films reject the participation in legend and remain self contained horrors which are terrifying (Thacker in Collapse IV makes a similar point - p. 89).
Carpenter’s The Thing is particularly interesting because the thing itself is between formed and formless it is a creature which, if it has an orginary form, we never see it - throughout the film it, in various states of accuracy, copies the creatures around it. The thing is the embodiment of the organic excess of the organic, the drive’s axis of iteration. While this is the drive axis that is fitting to horror, and that which is key to speculative materialism as articulated by Brassier, terror’s axis of alteration, the transcription of trauma, is neglected. This is clear when, at the end of Nihil Unbound, Brassier equates Trieb with only repetition towards death.
Thus we end up somewhere between Benjamin Noy’s positing of the horror of time, the experience of time as a kind of horrendous all at once, and a potential buggering of Virlio’s notion of dromology. That is, where Brassier points to the correlationist separation of time and space, we might point out his removal of the experiential of effects of time - as a sharp terror and a creeping horror.
Several points in the post are indebted to discussions here and here.
Derrida’s notion of language play and the purported death of the transcendental signifier seems to have anchored narratology, as it is understood in cultural studies and many veins of literary studies, in the swamp of post-structuralism. Furthermore, the phenomenological and post-Kantian articulation of experience as existence can, as Ray Brassier indirectly argues, can be construed as an ongoing attempt to narrativize being. In the beginning of Nihil Unbound, Brassier works through Paul Churchland’s Eliminative Materialism pointing out that while attempting to stream line human subjectivity (by erasing folk psychology - the understanding of human interiority through exterior observation) Churchland runs into a problem when he has to relate neurochemically caused consciousness to the outside world. The problem is that since all we are is a neurochemical network that represents the world - something outside that network must allow for that network (since the network, as any set, cannot contain itself).
Whereas thinkers such as Churchland envision a world where philosophy is gradually subsumed by developments in science, the problem of science’s limit, immediately raises the question of the place of reason, observation and transcendence in scientific naturalism. Brassier engages Quentin Meillassoux’s concept of the arche-fossil - the idea that there is a time prior to time - that events which occurred prior to the possibility of experience (by way of consciousness) such as the big bang, seriously challenge the phenomenological purchase on reality. While Brassier seems to support a theory of objects in themselves, that is that certain things pre-exist our experience, he is critical of Meillassoux’s fossil because it maintains the distinction between anthropocentric time and cosmological time thereby allowing phenomenolgists to disregard pre-experiential time as not existing properly until it was grasped by thought thereby placing Meillassoux’s ancestral realm as a reservoir ‘waiting’ to be intuited. The common thread here is that the mythical view of man, the view that any experience prior to the emergence of humanity only has value as it is researched or dug up through our experience, allows for a narrative which is contingent only to serve the centrality of human experience. It is for this reason that correlationist philosophy, philosophy that pays particular heed to Heidegger, is damaging to philosophy proper.
Brassier’s argument about the need for philosophy proper, in many ways, mirrors Copjec’s discussion of the Real as the self effacing quality that must exist in order to maintain consistency of any discursive construction. Copjec uses Deleuze’s discussion of Foucualt’s use of power - for power to be the force that it is in history Deleuze points out that it must trip over itself or else it risks becoming totalizing in such a way that it would be undifferentiated from existence itself. Meillassoux’s necessity of contingency falls in place here as well - the universe is necessary contingent and, this contingency refers to the law of contingency as well thereby showing not that all is flux but that flux itself is in flux. Here we can look back at Churchland’s problem of relating the network to the world and how it is supposedly solved by Speculative Realism:
Brassier argues that thought and being must be integrated without recourse to transcendentalism or phenomenology by way of Meillassoux and he accomplishes this by working through the thought of Francois Laurelle’s non-philosophy. Brassier adapts Laurelle’s definition of the Real as the zero point of being against defining it as the impossible (which he attributes to Lacan) and stating that it is what Badiou attempted to construct, via subtractive ontology as ‘being-nothing.’ While Brassier’s critique of Badiou seems rather apt, his quick dismissal of Lacan appears problematic. Copjec’s, as well as other Lacanians’, reading of the real is that it is what guarantees consistency via a self sabotaging which dismisses the myth of totality a la Godel and Russel. Here is where Transcendental Materialism and Speculative Realism come to a head - the the discussion of the narrative.
In a footnote Brassier writes:
“In Zizek’s Hegelianism, the subject achieves its autonomy by retroactively positing/reintegrating its own contingent material determinants: freedom is the subjective necessity of objective contingency. But by dissolving the idea of a necessary connection between cause and effect, Meillassoux’s absolutization of contingency not only destroys materialist ‘determinism’ understood as the exceptionless continuity of the casual nexus, but also the idealist conception of subjective ‘freedom’ understood in terms of the second-order reflexive causality described by Zizek. The subject cannot ‘choose’ or determine its own objective determination when the contingency of all determination implies the equal arbitrariness of every choice, effectively erasing the distinction between forced and unforced choice. Thus it becomes impossible to distinguish between objective compulsion and subjective reflexion, phenomenal heteronomy and noumenal autonomy. The principle of factuality collapses the distinction between first and second order levels of determination, thereby undermining any attempt to distinguish between objective heteronomy and subjective autonomy” (Nihil Unbound, p. 247 n15).
Speculative realism. as it is articulated by Ray Brassier, suggests that because the determinism is voided by the hyper chaos of existence, because every situation is incomplete (a la Russel/Godel) there can be no definite chain of events that allows us to reflect on, to retroactively assert our freedom as Zizek argues. Brassier use of Meillassoux’s necessity of contingency in relation to the laws of nature to damage Zizek’s claims about retroactive freedom due to the fact that freedom is automatic and not reflexive due to the place of the object in Brassier’s thinking. Because, for Brassier, the object must be thought through, and thereby precedes thought, and because these objects make up a reality that is not all due to the fact that the laws of nature are themselves contingent (here Adrian Johnston’s reading of Zizek’s reading of Schelling appears useful).
While Brassier’s final reflections on the death drive in Nihil Unbound suggest a subjectivity that essentially ‘clears the field’ by way of its ‘being-nothing’ this sense of freedom seems indebted to the object (of the brain in this case?) as a kind of filter for our particular individuation - our own worthless repetitious response to the knowledge of extinction. Brassier’s discussion of freedom, as a kind of agency, appears to be missing from the text, and his strongest rejection of Zizek’s assertion would most likely lie in keeping being and thought separate without relying on transcendentalism. The question becomes: Is Brassier’s use of Laurelle’s Unilateral Dualism (a twoness in the void where one side runs amok, becomes an excess of the other) that different from Johnston’s articulation of Transcendental Materialism - where consciousness runs away from gray matter?
For Brassier, transcendence is only operative on the side of the object which is given (without relation, without givenness) by the real whereas Transcendental Material operates in an almost backwards fashion - transcendence is operative via giveness which the object gives from the real. Put in terms of consciousness: for Brassier the real gives us the brain which allows thinking but through a disjunction whereas for Johnston/Zizek, thought escapes the limits of the brain and goes to work on it.
Both Brassier and Zizek are attempting to write a narrative of humanity that is meaningless and yet useful, at least, until the stars go down and the heat death (or perhaps the big rip) of the universe begins. One has to wonder how irksome Brassier would find the extent which the human race would go to, pointlessly, exist beyond the death of the universe. The distinct possibility that, in the cold days of the degenerate era, trillions of years in the future, that humans, then huddled around a white dwarf, the universe’s last light, opened a quantum bubble and hopped into another universe.
In a recent episode of Lost entitled “The Constant”, Desmond, a character who up until the previous episode had believed to be clairvoyant, begins jumping back and forth through time - his visions acknowledged as incomplete memories. Desmond eventually learns that he has become ‘unstuck’ in time - his consciousness begins to swing back and forth over a span of eight years. By talking to the island’s local physicist he learns that he must discover his constant - an object or person that is the same in both times thereby stabilizing his rapidly decaying being. What brought on his shifting is unknown - only that it occurred when he left the island where, at least so far in the story, there seems to be some sort of time dilation or other spatio-temporal disturbance.
What makes the episode so interesting is that Desmond’s constant is Penny - the love of his life who after he has seemingly disappeared off the face of the planet - spares no expense in finding him (of course there is her name connection, Penelope to that of legend - the woman who waited endlessly for her husband to return from the sea). Why is this interesting? I want to argue that love, by its very nature, is that which sticks us in time and is, paradoxically, what unsticks us, what submits us and raises us above temporality itself.
One of the most interesting, if not the most interesting, point that Zizek makes in The Sublime Object of Ideology is that ‘love is a forced choice.’ He explains this by simply pointing out that one cannot choose who one loves nor can one be forced into loving someone, instead what happens is that the loving subject realizes that they have fallen in love, having already choosen, only after the fact.
Love is, fundamentally, a freely chosen act of unfreedom. It is a choice, made without one’s knowledge that forecloses further choices - particularly when it is considered a ‘thought terminating cliche’ (here we might interject Badiou’s claim apropos Fernando Pessoa that love is a thought) or something with ‘absolute value’ as Russell put it. One can also interpret the anchoring or ’stuckness’ of love in the usual derogatory comments about marriage - in particular husband comments about wives - such as the ‘old ball and chain.’
Despite the negative examples of love’s stuckness, there is unquestionably an appeal to an identitarian anchor when existence is, undeniably, lost in a Heraclitean river of constant change. Hoftstadter, discussing identity, brings up Plutarch’s Ship of Theseus:
“The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.”
The question becomes one of the persistence of identity and how plastic our notions of being are. The strongest attempt at solving the paradox is to simply think of the ship as a four dimensional object - taking time into account as a dimension and as part of the object, maintains the object’s self identical nature. In effect any object is made of up three dimensional slices of time which causally effect one another - of course there is the issue of relativity - who is observing the changes, what does it mean to change over time for the observing others? The question of sameness is messy - where does the persistence of a person’s identity break down and they change ‘too much’ - where is the validity of ‘you’re not the person I fell in love with.’ Even four-dimensionalism says nothing about the substance that the ‘I’ refers to or the ‘you’ for that matter.
Love continues to complicate matters in that it changes basic numeracity - the numerical thing that I am, this object in relation to other objects, disavows the possibility that I could fundamentally become a thing that does not fall under the category of my name and yet what happens to the numericity when there is the radical twoness of love by way of Badiou? One might find it useful to dive a bit into the philosophy of Whitehead and argue that the substance of metaphysics is, in fact, not a substance at all but a kind of solidified occasion - a collection of windows - Whitehead’s materiality is an organic one - he reverses Kant - the world isn’t grasped (imperfectly) by the subject the world births the subject as such. Whitehead’s metaphysics however, seems to validate Deleuze’s One-All which dangerously induces a full material nature, a completeness which, under the lens of psychoanalysis (and our own voidal subjectivity) is porous.
To return to the event of love then, how much are the particular spatio-temporal qualities of the lovers involved in the recognition of love as such? If, as Badiou argues, the object of desire, the objet petit a, serves only as the guiding star of the encounter, then it seems that the storm of change surrounding and penetrating the identities of the lovers is of little or no concern as long as the fidelity to the truth, found in the intial encounter (the chance of fate where the lovers met) is lived up to/worked through.
In this sense, and to return us to the force choice of love and “The Constant,” love’s defining feature is that it plasticizes everything around it (hence the cliche ‘love conquers all’). When one says ‘I love you’ it is often followed by, at some time or another, ‘I will always love you and I have always loved you.’ One can read these statements both dichronically and synchronically. ‘I’ve always loved you’ usually means that despite our difficulties my love for you was never nulled and yet, more radically, it can also mean that before I even knew you (experientially) I loved you. In terms of I will always love you - this can be taken as regardless of ‘what happens my love for you will not change’ and also that ‘beyond my and your existence my love for you continues.’
Again it is worth mentioning that, at the beginning of Zizek!, Slavoj says that love is formally evil because you place a fragile person or thing above all else. What makes it formally evil, and not just evil in the standard sense but in the Kantian radically evil sense, is that it is not about an attachment to a particular thing (a love) but the real fragment of that person, that which does not change in the other over time, the very gap of the beloved’s subjectivity. The other side of the coin here would be the event of love, instead of being an amorous encounter a la Badiou, would be given an external justification (or master signifier) - we were meant to be because why else would we be together?
To return to Lost, the show constantly enacts a battle between fate and free will - the characters are constantly refering to the possibility or impossibility of destiny and the events of the show seem to suggest that the gap of choice is tiny or non-existent. If there is to be a kind of choice it is our ability to ‘freely choose’ our destiny - to accept our fate. Ben, the former villain (or perhaps still a villain) saw his great strength in manipulating people especially in his ability to make people ‘freely’ choose what he wants them to do. Here again we have the formal equation of love and evil as freely chosen unfreedom - isn’t the standard war criminal response - ‘I was just following orders’ and doesn’t this, as Zizek suggests, outsource free will?
Contrary to evil however, while the destiny of love is registered in the the big Other, seen as the ‘answer of the Real’ (the universe guided us to one another), responsibility, as such, weighs upon us. Love is, as Badiou says, a slow march, a two-headed interpretation of the world. The test of love is obviously time since, as stated above, attraction is fleeting (as are various identitarian details) and the remainder of each shared shift of experience separates another glob of matter from the void of our being.
To anchor ourselves in the previous entry - how can we be sure that love is testing one’s fidelity to the event of love (or the attachment to one another’s identitarian je ne sais qua) and not simply an example of confirmation bias and anchoring - or put more simply: does love only continue when we are afraid of lonliness and because we are cognitively adept at putting up with discomfort? Or to ask in terms of “The Constant” - what is it about Penny that makes her Desmond’s constant, how is it that she can be the axiom of his existence regardless of time and space?
Stay tuned.
Cognitive dissonance, the psychological concept whereby subjects are seriously irked by contrary ideas rattling around in their skulls, recently received a blow at the hands of a discipline-wandering statistician. M. Keith Chen set out to disprove the application of cognitive dissonance to apes’ choice of candy, by way of applying the Monty Hall Paradox (arguing that psychologists were making a serious statistical error). The Paradox goes like this:
There are three doors before you and you are told that behind two of the doors there are goats and behind one door is a sports car. After choosing a door Monty opens one of the two doors that wasn’t chosen and reveals a goat. He then asks if you want to stay with your initial choice or switch. Despite the apparent probabilities of the situation - one should switch regardless. Put most simply - our originally choice will only we right 1/3 of the time whereas switching gives us a 2/3 chance at getting the car.
Chen took note of a popular psychological study in which monkeys were giving three differently colored candies (red, green and blue). If the monkeys favored red over green then, when given the choice between green and blue, they would, overwhelmingly, choose blue since they had, according to cognitive dissonance, associated green with a bad taste. Chen convincingly argues that the researchers overlooked the fact that the initial choice was between equal options (namely that the candies were all the same, setting aside color).
The conclusion is that psychologists utilizing cognitive dissonance assumed that there was nothing to persuade the monkey to choose one color over another (based on sensory data) and that once that choice had been made that they assigned negative value to the color not picked, that the road less traveled was less traveled for a reason.
What are the deeper conclusions here - if we do not necessarily devalue the road not taken, then what happens to the un-choosen and is there any cognitive ramifications when it comes to a choice, to a decision? The very word decision suggests a cut - where one thing is cut in two. As I have discussed earlier apropos Alenka Zupancic’s reading of Kant, the fundamental act of freedom is not a yes but a no, a no to the deterministic elements that entrap us or, put another way, the illusion of freedom, of thinking we are free subjects, allows us a certain amount of freedom. To paraphrase Zupancic this is the Real of the Illusion.
As I argued earlier we can explain the negative act of freedom as such:
1 - I am involved in a question/situation
2 - I must freely choose (my very existence condemns me to freedom)
3 - Because my choice is limited (by external factors), it is not an actual ‘free’ choice
4 - The question/situation is lacking (in Lacanian parlance not-All), and not an actual question/situation
5 - I do not have to answer and therefore I am free
The very refusal of a choice (whether couched in terms of Mu or Hofstadter’s Unasking) seems beneficial to yes or no and yet changing, once a decision has been made, is better than the initial choice. The question remains - why the red candy over the blue? Another reading of this decay of dissonance, suggests a odd view at several other popular psychological categories such as anchoring and confirmation bias.
Gary Marcus’ somewhat interesting but ultimately disappointing text Kludge, describes, with various studies as evidence, how the imperfections of the human brain (due to the sloppiness of evolution) cause our fundamentally irrational behavior. Marcus seems to make the same categorical error as Chomsky, Dawkins, Dennet and other anayltic thinkers make in that he equates irrationality with stupidity (this is often due to a gross underestimation or misunderstanding of desire). Furthermore, throughout Kludge Marcus points out the shotty construction of the human brain in comparison to that of computers - paying particular attention to how unsystematic our memory is compared to computers. One might take EW Dijkstra’s quote “The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim” and tweak it thusly: “The question of whether a human can remember is no more interesting than the question of whether a computer can forget.” The suggestion being (and there is a study which Marcus disregards without explanation) is that our ability to forget allows us to think about possibility - to connect seemingly unrelated thoughts to ‘futurize’ the present.
If choice is not fundamentally conservative via psychocology, what does this say, in a semi-related fashion, about Derrida’s well known neologism differAnce - that meaning is always differed and requires the obfuscation of the other option in order for the choice to appear as such? DifferAnce appears as a kind of meta-cognitive dissonance - that cognitive dissonance is avoided because a certain possibility is disregarded apriori. In other words, I appreciate the red candy only by disregarding the blue and green ones - I always see the red first and I see it at the expense of the blue and green.
A step further would be to suggest whether the initial choice has more to do with almost imperceptible differences among them or a predisposition in the chooser and whether this predisposition is more nature or nurture. Catherine Malabou argues that an opposition of nature and nurture (as well as the material and immaterial) is quickly shattered when one takes a look at the plasticity of the brain. The simply process of learning makes clear that a certain nurturing of nature takes place and that the brain is naturally designed to be nurtured as such. For Malabou the brain’s development is dialectical materialist one. It should be noted that plasticity takes us into the middle of the conflict between dialectical materialism and metaphysics and subsequently, the difference of transcendence and immanence.
And, as Adrian Johnston strongly argues, our consciousness and our sense of freedom cannot be reduced to mere epiphenomenon - the fact that the ‘mirage’ of consciousness can physically re-wire and reshape the contours of the brain suggests, more than slightly, that our concept of mind has ontologically heft. Is it enough to say that this excess guarantees the abyss of freedom? Apropos Johnson and neuropsychologists like Joseph LeDoux and Francois Ansermet, we can say that even if consciousness is illusion simple acts of what could be called brain excercise - whether it’s learning a song on the piano or re-learning how to write after a stroke, rewrite the material complexities of the brain thereby stretching out our mental and physical capabilities.
So, to return to choice, does it end up in the mechanics of the brain between our ancestral (instinctive) capacities and our deliberative (rational) ones as Marcus puts it? A recent study showed that so called ‘gut decisions’ actually reveal a complex light show on neural imaging machines - suggesting that a split second thought process is not simply visceral, nor is it restricted to the instictive parts of the brain.
To delve into this relationship, and to continue on with decisions, we will, next time, investigate love once again.
