razorsmile :: philosophy//magic //revolution

Category: subjectivity

  • Capitalism and the schizoanalytic unconscious.

    Capitalism and the schizoanalytic unconscious.

    (These notes provided the basis for a talk I gave to the A2Z group in London, March 31st 2017.  I have uploaded the fuller set of notes as a PDF here)

    Capital and the schizoanalytic unconscious website PDF October 2017Download

    “I am interested”, Guattari says, “in a totally different kind of unconscious. It is not the unconscious of specialists, but a region everyone can have access to with neither distress nor particular preparation: it is open to social and economic interactions and directly engaged with major historical currents”.  It is useful to think about Guattari’s interest by considering what he says in another essay – “molecular analysis is the will to a molecular power, to a theory and practice that refuses to dispossess the masses of their potential for desire”.  The schizoanalytic practice is thus a means by which desire is brought front and centre without it being subsumed under the priests of interpretation.

    This desire on the part of Guattari, to liberate the role of desire from the prisons of interpretation, is no doubt tricky to embrace.  As he notes in the essay ‘Everybody wants to be a fascist’, the core of this problem lies in the collective reality of desire.  At one point he reflects on the performative contradiction that might be thought to exist in the situation of an individual lecturer offering this schizoanalytic account – “in reality, everything I say tends to establish that a true political analysis cannot arise from an individuated enunciation” because “the individuated enunciation is the prisoner of the dominant meanings.  Only a subject-group can manipulate semiotic flows, shatter meanings, and open the language to other desires and forge other realities”.  

    This problem, of the individuated enunciation in relation to the group ear, becomes clearly visible when Guattari remarks, in the same essay on fascism, that “what’s the use of polemicising: the only people who will put up with listening to me any longer are those who feel the interest and urgency of the micropolitical antifascist struggle that I’m talking about”.  This acute sense of the limitations of those who will ‘put up with’ him appears to echo the actual practice of engagement with strange and psychotic discourses, no doubt reflecting Guattari’s continual concrete engagement with psychotics in institutions like La Borde.  The difficulties of dealing with the repetitions of psychotic language or behaviour often express themselves in terms of precisely this capacity to ‘put up with’ things, a capacity that the wider socius – outside of a clinical setting – generally lacks.  One of the main difficulties someone with a ‘mental health problem’ encounters is the wearing down of their personal relationships as people refuse to ‘put up with’ behaviours and language that disrupts the smooth functioning of the social machine, a difficulty that is shared by anyone who speaks, writes or thinks in a way that doesn’t conform to the easy-mode game of social cues and interactions.  Most people prefer their games set to easy-mode.  So when Guattari  – who is often identified as one of the ‘deliberately obscure’ thinkers – acknowledges that he is difficult to listen to it might be thought that he is acknowledging the idiosyncrasies of his style.  It is, however, not simply the style of his language but the content of his thought that is what becomes difficult to listen to.

    The relation between the specific enunciator and the group ear, constitute the real terms of actual enunciation.  It stands in contrast with the “universal interlocutor”, that great imaginary face of reason in front of whom every rational speaker is supposed to stand, awaiting judgement.  Analysis, reason, explanation, all operate, for the most part, inside this system of the ‘judgement of God’, in which the particularity of the statements are meant to be swept away in favour of the universality of the supposed ‘truth’ they attempt to articulate.  Yet this strange, abstract model of reason hides in plain sight a simple lie, which is that what is said is what matters.  This lie, that it is what is said that matters, removes that crucial and seemingly incontrovertible reality of the ear.  In practice the users of language constantly negotiate with the ear, constantly re-speak their words as they negotiate with the ear of their interlocutor, a negotiation that constitutes the basis of ‘personal relationships’.  The to-and-fro between one individual and another in an intimate relationship reveals the reality of the ear in the word – what the other hears matters more than what words were used and the words are highly fungible in the struggle to make oneself heard or to hear what someone means.  Anyone who fails to realise this will have many failed relationships.  What you think you said matters less than what they know they heard.

    Whilst this problem of the ear is acute in the relations people have with the ‘psychotic’ individual, it is prevalent to one degree or another in all talk, in all discourse.  It’s not a clean problem, however, not an error that can be corrected.  Rather it’s a dirty problematic, one that refuses to be washed away and which calls for other strategies, ones that cannot be prescribed but which must be acquired.  When Guattari says that the ones who will put up with him are the ones ‘who feel the interest and urgency’ of the problem he is addressing it is crucial to hear this emphasis on feeling.  The collective conversation, this coming together of mouth and ear, is grounded in this ‘vague sense’ that we ascribe to feelings.  It may be true that I feel before I think but what is forgotten is that I don’t stop feeling once I begin to think.  Thought is only ever alive and real, actual, when it is within a specific network of feelings.  There is no actual thought in the pages of a book left on the shelf, at best only virtual thought.  There is no thought without a tone of existence, without an ‘affect’ within which it is both produced and constrained.

    It’s easy to find much talk of ‘affect’ in modern philosophy and critical thought, although it is perhaps waning as the flavour of the month.  Yet the connection between ‘affect’ and the ‘schizoanalytic unconscious’ is strong and thinking them together can amplify their capacity to be useful tools in making the world thinkable.  In the contemporary world the problem of a political future distinct from the one we live in is deeply constrained by the problem of ‘thinkability’.  We hear the idea that “a radically different future is unthinkable”, a point that has been made enough times now to become almost second nature to many.  Yet the problem of the unthinkable future is best encountered not through pessimism but through a kind of joy, a joy that rests in the fact that thought is explosive.  What I mean by this is that thought operates not in a causal sequence but in terms of excessive moments, those breakthroughs, sudden glimpses, the shifts and slides of the ‘aha!’ moment, what sometimes goes under the name of ‘insight’, a term not without it’s own difficult implications.  In this situation if the problem of the moment is that the future is unthinkable then, at the same time, this blockage is deeply fragile.  All it takes is for the thought of the future to arrive for the damn to burst.

    This ‘all it takes’ is not nothing, however, it is not there to suggest an easy way to thinking the future but rather to indicate that peculiar fragility which perhaps cannot be perceived in the present but that, nevertheless, we can wager exists.  The wager becomes easier to make if the stakes are placed on the right horse and it is in this that the role of ‘affect’ and the ‘schizoanalytic unconscious’ can help, predominantly by replacing the ‘cognitive priority’ conception of consciousness.  Within this conception of consciousness thought is conceived as a series of moments,usually moving from starting point to conclusion, whereby an ‘input’ is transformed into an ‘output’.  This model of transformation is deeply delusional and massively idealistic.  It assumes some kind of autonomous module that exists within the ‘mind’ and which mediates the input/output relations, relations in the broad sense between ‘world’ as input and ‘behaviour’ as output.  Instead of such an abstractly autonomous module, consciousness is instead a kind of shape, one that exists within a network of relations and which possesses only as much autonomy as is possible within the particular state of relations.  That network of relations which places limits of the amount of autonomy possible is what can be thought with the concepts of ‘affect’ and the ‘schizoanalytic unconscious’.  The material body that thinks exists inside the social relations it is organised into, which it expresses as a particular set of affects (feelings) that in turn constitute the landscape of its possibilities, it’s ‘schizoanalytic unconscious’.

    These four elements – the material body that thinks, the social relations, the sets of affects and the landscape of possibilities – all operate to constitute a world and each is malleable to a greater or lesser degree.  A political thought which takes each seriously and which understands them to be moments of the articulated whole needs to think of causality less as a sequence of temporal moments and more as a fluid articulation of complex connections between points, as a set of vertices and edges.  The shape that is constituted by the vertices and edges is the contemporary world of the subject, it is, in effect, the shape of consciousness at any particular moment.  Within contemporary capitalism the shapes of consciousness continually undergo a set of pressures that attempt to ‘push’ such shapes into a particular mould, that attempt to fit square pegs into round holes, or more exactly that attempt to fit variable pegs into round holes.  The round hole is constituted by ‘capital’, by an abstract, non-conscious yet non-material force – a law of production – that is capable of direct effect on the points and lines that form the shape.  It’s capacity to deform the shapes of consciousness rests in the force it brings to bear on the shapes of consciousness, forces which produce, amongst others, the idea of the ‘wage labourer’, but which operates, fundamentally, as the primary force acting on contemporary consciousness.  To that extent our problematic can be stated quite clearly – capitalism and contemporary consciousness are connected, but is the connection contingent or necessary?.

  • The class war in our heads

    The class war in our heads

    1469799942301.jpg_5631408793549855746Why bother with Freud today, a century after his work and ideas first began to have their effect?  Is psychoanalysis really taken seriously anymore?  Isn’t the whole dirty, sorry, splintered image of psychoanalysis something to be forgotten, something to put behind us as one more moment of false enlightenment?

    The image of psychoanalysis within the Western intellectual realm is deeply problematic, rejected by many as inherently unscientific, accused by others of being little more than charlatanism and self-serving duplicity and yet the practice remains, indeed it often appears like it is increasingly called for by health practitioners and state services.  If the intellectuals tend to relegate psychoanalysis to curious theory, the state and capital still find it to have some place in the tools of modern governance.  Why bother with Freud today?  One answer is that we have no option to consider Freud again and again because in modern capitalist society, if we are to think against the stream, against the state, against capital, then we are faced with the effects of Freudianism, of psychoanalysis, in the very tissue of our lives.  In the realm of advertising and public relations we encounter the legacy of Edward Bernays and the tradition of manufacturing consent, in the clinical practices of everyday life we find human lives can be affected, often positively, by psychoanalytic techniques and in the malaise or revolutionary politics we re-encounter – time and again – the problems of self-repression group psychology that Reich so notoriously placed centre stage.  The fact that Freud still haunts our streets and minds might, however, suggest a more radical surgery is needed, that we need to redouble our efforts to unmask the charlatans, convince others of the unscientific nature of the whole practice and finally eject the psychoanalysts from polite society.

    A lingering doubt remains, however, that this is not the right course of action.  Not least this arises because of the peculiar polarisation of positions that can be encountered in modern debates about agency, politics, the mind and consciousness.

    On one side we find the neuroscientists who increasingly develop their capacity to understand the wiring of the brain as well as their skill at re-engineering the mind.  There is no avoiding the fact that neuroscience is rapidly developing into one of the most fascinating and powerful new tools in the human arsenal of war against the given, a war led by science, which finds wonder and joy in the subjugation of nature and the extension of the possibilities of human life.  Neuroscience does already and will increasingly offer new possibilities for liberation and yet this is not its central purpose and it has equal potential to provide weapons of mass subjugation.  Neuroscience is powerless to answer the question of who rules the technology, who wields the policies and potentials of the capacities it will unleash.  It will no doubt produce those who cry out at the conversion once more of ploughshares into weapons but it has no inherent capacity to prevent such conversion and the likelihood of those who rule successfully using such tools as weapons is, as always with any technology, bordering on the absolute.   Nor does it have any power over the risks of the profit potential of the mass deployment of neuroscientific techniques, the insidious conversion of yet another piece of knowledge into a simple means of extending the range of exchange values regardless of the consequences.  Neither the state, nor the capitalist, care much for ethics, empowerment or human extension other than as means to their own inherent goals – those goals, as always, being distinct from often humanistic concerns that might motivate the neuroscientists.

    On the other side, however, we find too often the simplistic claim that no matter how much the physicalist tells us about the psychical, there will always remain some leftover capacity to choose, to act against our natures, to make ourselves differently in the face of our biological destiny or structure.  We can affirm, in the face of the physical, the irreducibility of the psychical, although this crude dualism is often couched in far more sophisticated terms nowadays.  The realm of freedom, of self-giving laws, of loyalty to the idea, of choice, this, we are told, trumps the scanners and chemicals and scalpels.  If only that were so but who, today, can seriously hold to a concept of some mysterious power that appears to resist the physical in a simply willful way.  We can no more avoid our brains than we can gravity.  And yet…

    It is not for a middle path that we need to look again, yet again, at Freud.  It is, instead, because of a completely different option opened up by Freud (and by Marx and Nietzsche), one that is not inherently fixed on the often unthought assumption that the goal is to determine the way things are determined, by reasons or causes or a mixture of both perhaps.  Freud offers one of the routes to the senses of production within which we might find both the production of determinations and the production of indeterminations.  These senses of production, modes of production, are more than simply determinations because they are the conditions of any concrete determinations.    They are – and this cannot be avoided – far more complex processes than any to be found in either the physical or the psychical.  The very distinction between a mind and a body is resultant from, grounded in, such modes of production and is no more a natural fact than the division between the ‘races’ or ‘genders’ or ‘classes’.  To put it crudely – and with a view to shunning away from this text all who are already inherently agents of capitalism – there is a class war in our heads.  Freud is worth turning to again because he was perhaps the first to encounter this, even if he distorted it as he did so.  To fight this war we cannot simply discard those tools of the enemy that work, they must instead be turned from weapons back into ploughshares.

    If this emphasis on the class war suggests a partisan relation to the material at hand, then so be it.  Only those who are too stupid to know that tools need to work no matter what task they are used for would think that such partisanship perverts enquiry.  This emphasis is, of course, one that places universal abstractions and absolute truths in the service of some wider goal, the goal of the liberation of the working class and the oppressed from the disgusting spectacle of capitalism.  This language, however, is riddled with connotations that have little practical use any more.  The days of the Communist Party – official or otherwise – are over, the mass party having given way to the mass movement and thence into the mass war.  We have been living in the Third World War for the last twenty years at least, probably longer, a war not amongst nation states and the capitalist class but a war against the working class and the oppressed.  Yet the greatest single fact of this war is it is always ‘over there’.  If the front lines of the war ever reach you in the form of guns and bombs and drones this is just the particular technology deployed in specific geopolitical spaces.  At all other times the war ‘over there’ goes on everywhere and nowhere and the casualties mount up in so-called ‘symptoms of modernity’ – mental health problems, curious behaviours, collective impotence and the failure of politics as a place of solutions.   At one point the class war occurred in the factory and the streets.  Now it has occupied the mind.  There is a class war in your brain.

    This is to state baldly, polemically, what needs to be argued for, it is little more than assertion at this stage and the task at hand is to offer some insight into this war and some tools with which to fight it that are not already in the hands of the enemy – and there is without doubt an enemy.  We are not ‘all in this together’ nor have we ever been.  We may only hope that if we fight and win we might be able, at some point, to remove the enemy from reality and consign the very concept to what will eventually become a pre-history of the new earth.

    The cards are on the table.  Our first question arises from the basic problem, which is not an intellectual one, abstract and polite, but a problem of determinate social production.  The question is then, what, in the face of the onslaught of a capitalist society, can Freud offer us as tools of understanding and weapons of survival?  If you want the polite, but insidiously abstracted version of this question, we might naively say something like “In the face of life, how can Freud offer us means of coping, or helping others cope?”  If we did, however, use such insipid words then we would, at once, be complicit with the very problem that forces us to find weapons of survival in the first place.   This thus brings us to our second question – does psychoanalysis offer us the means by which we might arm ourselves?  The response to this is firmly, hysterically, negative.  The prison warder is no friend, even if the prisoner must at times smile and say “yes sir”.  We are not left with a simple rejection, however, and it is because of a curious problem that arises – we are not the first to note this of course – between Freud and psychoanalysis as an institution that we will explore whether the tools are instead to be found in schizoanalysis.  We think schizoanalysis might offer weapons of liberation – and we say ‘might’ very consciously and explicitly because we are not yet, perhaps never will be, certain of this.  The ghost of Freud will therefore be joined by those of Deleuze and Guattari.  Hopefully we have, at this point, driven away the last of the readers we wish to avoid.

     

     

  • The off-switch as the ground of the Unconscious

    In a report of recent neuroimaging techniques, the lead scientist said the following – “our findings suggest that unconsciousness may be the increase of inhibitory assemblies across the brain’s cortex” (See here).  The statement is taken to be supportive of a particular theory about consciousness put forward by Susan Greenfield, which may or may not be the case.  Greenfields hypothesis seems, on the face of it, simply another form of modularity thesis about consciousness and although her metaphor of consciousness as a ‘dimmer’ switch rather than a binary state of on/off may be a good metaphor, it’s also rather obvious.  Did anyone actually think consciousness was a simple state that one either ‘had’ or didn’t have?  If they did, it seems rather absurd.  That said, the neuroimaging work, in probing the dynamics of the brain as it rises and falls into consciousness, sounds fascinating.  The spectral consciousness that begins to appear on the horizon as a result of increased levels of communication and signalling between neural assemblies in the brain doesn’t directly answer the central problem with any modularity concept when applied to the mind, rather than the brain, however – which is the question of how the parts become the appearance of a whole, the extent of what we might call the ‘holistic reality’ of the mind.  There’s much interesting discussion of this problem, some of which is usefully summarised in Carruthers article ‘Moderately massive modularity’.  In general Carruthers account of this holistic reality rests in the architecture sketched, in which language enables us to “build non-domain-specific conscious thinking out of modular components”.  All of this is fascinating stuff and at some point I want to explore the details of this in more depth.  For now, however, I want to pursue another thread, albeit in a kind of rambling ‘thinking out loud’ way.  As is common on this blog these are notes for myself, part of the process of thinking through things.

    What struck me as I read that phrase from Professor Pollard, the lead scientist on the neuroimaging work, was this idea that the increase of inhibitory processes is the ground of the unconscious.

    (more…)