I.
“You’re not in charge. If free will even exists, it doesn’t share
living space with the likes of you.”
~Peter
Watts, Blindsight
This paper carries the nominal qualification of a
“sequel.” A sequel presupposes a
prequel, a predecessor; but I admit that my previous post may not initially
appear to be a logical antecedent. This
post is a sequel because it derives from thoughts that inspired my previous
post, although it does not pursue the topic of techno-capital. Rather, it shifts its attention from the
macro to the micro, and I consider this move paramount and retroactive. That is, I believe that the argument laid out
here is necessary in order to arrive at the argument laid out in “Speculations
on Techno-Capital.”
The conclusion of my first year in graduate study has
afforded me plenty of time to read and think about texts that I find personally
interesting and valuable. While Samuel
Delany’s Dhalgren is currently
occupying the portion of my desk reserved for fiction (I will hopefully make a
post on this novel before summer’s end), the portion reserved for nonfiction
supports the weighty texts of Deleuze and Guattari, Fredric Jameson, and Nick
Land (Žižek’s Less Than Nothing will
prove an extended endeavor, I imagine).
In addition to my reading, my spare time has also allowed me to reflect
more on my blog posts and the arguments I lay out in them. In today’s piece, I wish to explore what I
consider to be the construction of the human self, and to attempt a
redefinition at what we tend to think of as the self. This redefinition is by no means unique, but
is actually the one that, I believe, is currently supported by a growing number
of scientific and philosophical resources.
I hope to suggest how this redefinition of the self holds serious
consequences for how we perceive our cultural institutions and rituals.
Contemporary philosophy and critical theory has long
pursued the dismantling of the individual, but only recently has the domain of
science taken up this pursuit as well.
This is not to say that the philosophers were right and the scientists
were wrong. Science is the domain of
epistemology – structures and hierarchies of knowledge, the fitting of natural
phenomena into categories and defining them by laws. Philosophy is the domain of ontology – the
pursuit of what makes something what it is, the pursuit of essences. Only with the height of modernity, and
primarily the twentieth century, have essences seen their demise, and this
destruction has not arrived without paradox.
Everywhere we look we perceive essences where they do not exist, which
first calls up the great correlationist question.[1] We impose structures and representations
where they do not belong, and we do so for our convenience. We have yet to fully grasp the implications
of the fact that the world was not made for us.
If there is one place where the lingering specter of
essence persists most frustratingly, it is in the very seat of the Cartesian cogito:
human consciousness, the subject, the “I”, that which makes an individual human
being what it is. Despite
deconstruction’s admirable attempt throughout the 1960s and 70s, and
neuroscience’s far more convincing experiments in more recent years, the
specter of human consciousness refuses to let go, and with good reason: it has
been the sanctioning authority of everything from our current cultural
institutions to our very history. Its
dissipation would be the deposal of human rights from the pedestal of humanism,
the breaking of covenants sacred and secular.
The abandonment of consciousness would appear to be the abandonment of
what it means to be human. For this
reason, consciousness holds fast.
In his novel Blindsight,
about which I have written before, Peters Watts contests that consciousness
constitutes the entirety of what we think of as the self. At the conclusion of this existentially
terrifying novel, human agency is drained of its power: “Make a conscious
choice. Decide to move your index finger.
Too late! The electricity’s
already halfway down your arm. Your body
began to act a full half-second before your conscious self ‘chose’ to, for the
self chose nothing; something else
set your body in motion, sent an executive summary – almost an afterthought –
to the homunculus behind your eyes” (Watts 301). The homunculus that Watts refers to is the
specter of the Cartesian cogito, the seat of consciousness we might say. Watts draws on the most recent discoveries
and developments in cognitive philosophy and neuroscience in order to make this
statement; studies that have revealed that neural action is already occurring, that your brain is already moving,
before you decide to consciously act (see Watts’s notes on page 371). Further recent developments have argued for
the reconceptualization of cultural institutions such as health care to be
oriented not toward the individual, but toward the community – but not the
community you might think. In his
article for The New York Times, “Some of My Best Friends are Germs,” Michael Pollan argues that the health of the body
cannot be reduced to the health of an individual: “Human health should now ‘be
thought of as a collective property of the human-associated microbiota,’ as one
group of researchers recently concluded in a landmark review article on
microbial ecology — that is, as a function of the community, not the
individual” (Pollan). Current studies
and investigations are emphasizing, more and more prominently, the nonexistence
of the individual and the coexistence of the collective.
This language will sound disturbingly political to some,
and it cannot help but carry such connotations.
Traditional arguments for Marxist political programs did not possess the
scientific support emerging in the field today.
Traditional Marxism, as outlined by numerous innovative thinkers and
practitioners, calls for a cognitive revolution, something bordering on new age
mysticism despite Marxism’s purportedly firm roots in historical
materialism. The utopian project of
structuring and implementing a communist society remains steadfastly beholden
to metaphysics because it must adhere to the enforcement of a transcendental
law, despite the common Marxist admonition of state control and power. Any enforcement of transcendental law will
automatically entail exclusion; this has been the historical case for
communism, from Stalinism onward. It has
seemed we needed a cognitive revolution to pull the communist train into the
station.
But communist thought and theory persisted, and it has
proved admirably adaptive. Perhaps most
importantly is communism’s (or at least communitarian thought’s) embrace of
contemporary scientific trends.
Horkheimer and Adorno put Enlightenment science to the test in their
watershed text, The Dialectic of
Enlightenment; but today, science is shifting ever more rapidly away from
the ideological and toward the explosive, the revolutionary. That is, science is more radically pushing up
against its own boundaries, suggesting possibilities and realities that have
been thought unimaginable for centuries.
Now, with the growing inertia of techno-capital and the expanding means
of science, we are being shown a picture of “the human” that shatters our
previous expectations.
Not only does consciousness not account for the majority
of bodily and mental functions that take place unconsciously in the body; it is
also an illusion. Returning to Watts’s novel, we find a
beautifully succinct and disturbing account of consciousness as an evolutionary
phenomenon:
Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains – cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable
heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the
algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize into art. Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now
be had from pointless introspection.
Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the
system moves beyond modeling the organism.
It begins to model the very process
of modeling. It consumes evermore
computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant
simulations. Like the parasitic DNA that
accretes in every natural genome, it persists and proliferates and produces
nothing but itself. Metaprocesses bloom
like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves I. (303)
A cautious reader will
protest: “There is nothing illusory about this awakening. It may not be as mystical as philosophical
thought in previous centuries, but it is still real.” I give a gracious nod
to that reader, since I too have made the same observation. However, I wish to explore its ramifications
before simply conceding the seemingly obvious point that simply because we
experience consciousness it must be real.
Immediately we must recognize the relativism inherent in such a
claim. By the same token, a shaman who
witnesses a vision of a fertility goddess is just as correct as the prophet
Daniel. I want to push this
understanding further. Just because we experience consciousness does not mean
it is real. This is too broad. I would claim that consciousness is virtual, which is still a subcategory of
the real.
So we live in The
Matrix. No, that’s a bad joke; or, a
poor analogy. For the myth of
individualism and the power of the human still lurks at the heart of the Matrix franchise like a rotten (and
overwrought) core. The Matrix assumes that the human has been duped and that a false
veil has been pulled down over its eyes, concealing it from the truth. I contest, rather, that we have been duped by
no one (except perhaps ourselves); furthermore, the truth does not exist behind
some veil that must be pulled away. The
fantasy of a pasteboard mask that must be pierced paints us all as monomaniacal
Ahabs, obsessed with our own position and status in the world. The world, in this scenario, has been made for us, and we strive to understand
it. Consciousness becomes the vessel by
which we strive to understand the world; but my consciousness is not your
consciousness, is not a black slave’s consciousness, is not an ancient Greek’s
consciousness, is not an autistic person’s consciousness. Consciousness appears to us, falsely, as a
transcendental means by which we associate with the world, thus firmly
establishing it as something actually/really
existing. Such a position maintains
that, should all human beings suddenly vanish from existence, consciousness
itself would somehow persist as a reified, transcendent entity. Through this reasoning, all reality is
reduced to nothing more than the conscious perception of reality, leading certain
interpreters of Berkeley to conclude “esse est percipi.” In contrast to this line of reasoning, I
claim that consciousness is not transcendental, and this is the primary thrust
of my argument:
·
consciousness is immanent;
·
furthermore, consciousness is emergent;
·
and finally, consciousness is
collective.
II.
“‘So
I am the king! So the kingdom belongs to me!’
But this me is merely the
residual subject that sweeps the circle and concludes a self from its
oscillations on the circle.”
~Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Michel Foucault once remarked that the twentieth century
might one day be thought of as Deleuzian.
I don’t think he was too far off the mark; and if others disagree, I
feel that is only because Deleuze’s philosophy has not yet been properly
assimilated to the scientific theories it clearly complements. Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus takes Freudian-Oedipal psychoanalysis as its primary
target, and convincingly argues that Oedipal relations do not predate the
subject, lurking maliciously in the unconscious. Oedipus, Deleuze-Guattari claim, is a structural
apparatus forced upon the unconscious by psychoanalysis and (more broadly) by
capitalist society itself. Oedipus is a
representational, expressive model for something that is unrepresentable and
inexpressible. More specifically, D-G
attack what they perceive as a strict individualism (in terms of the ego) inherent in the Oedipal construct. The Oedipus complex perceives familial
dynamics throughout the stratum of social relations and figures, and ignores
the fluid motion of desiring-production.
In D-G’s impressive argument, the individual ego, structured within the
Oedipal triangle, is dismantled as a historical myth forced upon unconsciously
liberated organisms.
For D-G, the ego, or self, emerges as an effect out of a
complex system of colliding drives and desires.
The real consists purely of this interactive surface, and surface is all
it is. On this surface are written the
traces of desiring-production, which, in and throughout its own material,
performs the activities we typically attribute to conscious egos: “Schizoanalysis
methodically dismantles everything in Kant’s thinking that serves to align
function with the transcendence of the autonomous subject, reconstructing
critique by replacing the syntheses of personal consciousness with the
syntheses of impersonal unconscious.
Thought is a function of the real, something that matter can do” (Land
322). Consciousness is nothing more than
an effect of complex interactions of matter; thus, consciousness exists virtually within all matter. Furthermore, it cannot exceed this virtuality,
as will be demonstrated below. Its
manifestation in human beings should not be interpreted as a unique
privilege. It should be recognized as
the emergent process of a potentiality testifying to its potentiality. The illusory component of consciousness is
not that it does not exist, but that it mistakes itself as actual.[2]
This is all well and good; but is consciousness not self-consciousness? That is, does consciousness not entail
consciousness of itself, not as a separate act, but as contained immanently
within its own ontology? In order to
make the distinction we wish to make above, then it seems that we must separate
consciousness from self-consciousness.
Consciousness only exists virtually, and its awareness of itself emerges
as a kind of separate effect whereby consciousness testifies to its own
existence. But consciousness’s existence
is its own testimony; this is simply the definition of consciousness. Where have we gone wrong? I want to suggest here what will likely be an
unanticipated turn to Ludwig Wittgenstein.
In his Philosophical
Investigations, Wittgenstein explores the strangeness of self-awareness:
The feeling of an unbridgeable gulf
between consciousness and brain process: how come that this plays no role in
reflections of ordinary life? This idea
of a difference in kind is accompanied by slight giddiness – which occurs when
we are doing logical tricks. (The same giddiness attacks us when dealing with
certain theorems in set theory.) When
does this feeling occur in the present case?
It is when I, for example, turn my attention in a particular way on to
my own consciousness and, astonished, say to myself: ‘THIS is supposed to be
produced by a process in the brain!’ – as it were clutching my forehead. – But
what can it mean to speak of ‘turning my attention on to my own consciousness’?
(Wittgenstein 412)[3]
What is Wittgenstein
identifying here? He clearly identifies
consciousness as distinct from brain process.
Or does he? Wittgenstein’s text
is infamous for rigorously pursuing all claims into self-refutation; but here
we see something truly enlightening.
Consciousness, Wittgenstein means to say, only appears separate from
brain processes. He asks his readers
what it means to speak of turning our attentions to our consciousnesses because
he sees such an act as redundant, to put it simply.
Consciousness always has its attention turned toward
itself. Consciousness means
self-consciousness. In his forthcoming
review of Žižek’s Less Than Nothing,
Robert Pippin elucidates on this point, in reference to German Idealism: “For
in perceiving, I am also conscious of perceiving, conscious of myself
perceiving. In believing anything, I am
conscious of my believing, of myself committed to a belief. In acting, I would not be acting, were I not
conscious of myself acting” (Pippin 7-8).
Pippin makes explicit what is implicit in Wittgenstein’s text: that
consciousness means
self-consciousness, and cannot be separated from its own self-consciousness. Without self-consciousness, consciousness
would not be what it is. Awareness must
take its own act of being aware into account.
How can virtual consciousness take itself into account? If consciousness exists as a potentiality, it
would seem that it could not take its awareness into account since that
awareness is not actual; but, as I
argued above, consciousness is only ever
virtual. In fact, consciousness is
always testifying to its own virtuality.
How can this be? What we have
encountered is a paradox comparable to that of time travel in my previous post;
time travel, we concluded, can never be virtual. Once time travel exists in one time, or in
one instance, it exists in all times and instances. Consciousness, we are saying, is exactly the
opposite. Consciousness is never actual;
but this does not appear to make much sense.
I am experiencing
consciousness. Is my consciousness not actual?
In his book Consciousness
Explained, Daniel Dennett provides an illuminating discussion of how
language occurs, which in turn sheds light on his view of consciousness. Language, Dennett argues, occurs through a
kind of feedback loop between interior “content-to-be-expressed” and the
eventual linguistic expression:
The back-and-forth process that narrows
the distance is a feedback process of sorts, but it is just as possible for the
content-to-be-expressed to be adjusted in the direction of some candidate
expression, as for the candidate expression to be replaced or edited so better
to accommodate the content-to-be-expressed.
In this way, the most accessible or available words and phrases could
actually change the content of the
experience. (Dennett 247).
Most shocking about
this claim is that one’s interior sensations – typically considered the origin
of expressive communication – can be actively altered by the linguistic
process. The linguistic apparatus has a
measurable effect on the interior sensations we experience.[4] The best word to describe this process might
be “oscillation”; and indeed, this is the word that Deleuze and Guattari choose
to deploy in Anti-Oedipus (although
they are not speaking directly of language).
In Dennett’s case, consciousness can be said to be an emergent effect
arising partially from this interplay between internal content and expression;
but consciousness cannot account for this entire process, since some of it (the
active alteration of interior experience, for instance) goes unnoticed by the
conscious subject. Meaning is not
derived from a central agent, but partially from unconscious drives and
functions within the organism. This leads
Dennett to dismiss the myth of the Central Meaner, Dennett’s version of the Cartesian
cogito, the central ego that purportedly pulls the strings and makes conscious
decisions.
In Anti-Oedipus,
a similar oscillation takes place that actively destroys the myth of the
individual self, resulting in what D-G identify as the schizophrenic. Their proposed methodology becomes one of
analysis toward the multiplicity that emerges along the surface of
desiring-production:
Hence the goal of schizoanalysis: to
analyze the specific nature of the libidinal investments in the economic and
political spheres, and thereby to show how, in the subject who desires, desire
can be made to desire its own repression […] All this happens, not in ideology,
but well beneath it. An unconscious
investment of a fascist or reactionary type can exist alongside a conscious
revolutionary investment. (D-G 105)
Oedipal analysis, D-G
claim, places individualizing and categorizing frames across the fluid network
of surface relations. The unconscious –
the seat of liberation – suffers at the hands of traditional psychoanalysis,
which instead of assisting the unconscious strives to correct it, even repress
it. What occurs along the surface of
desiring-production is not the firm establishment – situation, positioning – of
an individual subject, but the oscillation of an organism experiencing a
multiplicity of drives. Desire is not
the choice of the subject, nor is it static.
Desire is constantly changing, constantly being changed. Just as in Dennett’s unique conceptualization
of language, D-G’s conceptualization of the self and desire disrupts the myth
of the coherent subject. What
consequences does all this have for consciousness?
Consciousness attempts to place itself despite being
constantly displaced. Consciousness
attempts to mean despite its meaning
being constitutively altered.
Consciousness attempts to organize itself into a coherent subject
despite being continually disorganized by the flows of desire. All of this is intimately tied up with how
consciousness perceives itself (and, as previously noted, consciousness is self-consciousness). How might we relate consciousness as it
perceives itself to consciousness as it really is?
III.
“And
where is the thing your self-representation is about? It is wherever you
are (Dennett, 1978b). And what is this thing? It’s nothing more than, and nothing less
than, your center of narrative gravity.”
~Daniel
Dennett, Consciousness Explained
It was stated earlier that consciousness as it is cannot
be separated from consciousness as it perceives itself; but now we are making a
claim that requires us to postpone the unity so as to better understand the
relation. What kind of quagmire have we
haphazardly stumbled into? Let us be
very clear here so as to avoid confusion:
·
Consciousness is a myth; not
consciousness as it really is (a virtual property of matter itself), but
consciousness as it is perceived by
itself
·
Consciousness as it really is exists as
a virtual material fact
·
Consciousness as perceived by itself is
mythologized because of the fact that
consciousness entails self-consciousness
·
Consciousness is always virtual – and never
actual – because it can only ever exist
in our perception of it
Consciousness, by its
very definition, can only exist in its own self-perception. Consciousness never exists unaware of itself;
if so, then it would not be consciousness.
If we dare to oppose esse est
percipi, then we must acknowledge that it works both ways: material things
subsist ontologically without our necessarily perceiving them; and just because
we do perceive something does not
mean that it exists.[5] Or, put more correctly, it does not really
exist in the way that we perceive it. A
plant sits on my windowsill. It exists
absent of my perception of it as it actually is; but it also exists virtually
(this I can imagine) as a larger plant in the future, and thus a watered plant,
or as a dead plant, if I am a particularly poor gardener. Its larger appearance and its death are not
actual, but this does not mean they are not real.
Consciousness constructs a virtual self, which is its
imagistic manifestation. This self, and
this consciousness, are not actual.
Consciousness emerges from a
feedback process, or oscillation, of desires and sensations along the surface
of matter. Upon its emergence – a new
state of matter itself – it perceives itself as constitutive. It expresses itself as central. But it is never more than an emergent effect
of matter. Its paradox appears as an
inverse of the paradox of time travel.
Time travel, once coming into existence, must have always been in
existence – it is never virtual, but only actual. Consciousness, because part of its definition
is to perceive itself, can never possess actuality. Consciousness, as reliant upon its own
self-awareness in order to exist, is always virtual.
What of the collectivity of consciousness? This must be granted as the final concession
to a self that is an illusion. I do not
intend this statement as a comparison to Jung’s mystical collective
unconscious. Consciousness, as an effect
of flows and desires across a surface of matter, is never isolated to a
solitary individual or organism.
Consciousness is a property of matter itself. You
do not have consciousness. You do not possess it. Consciousness makes you. If anything, you belong to it. Deleuze and Guattari
make an important observation in this respect when they comment on the false
conception of objects as property: “Partial objects [i.e. objects of desire]
now seem to be taken from people, rather than from the nonpersonal flows that
pass from one person to another. The reason
is that persons are derived from abstract quantities, instead of from
flows. Instead of a connective
appropriation, partial objects become the possessions of a person and, when
required, the property of another person” (D-G 71). The mythology of consciousness constructs
itself in a way that perceives its desires as personal and individual. For D-G, the Oedipal apparatus is yet another
consequence of the individualistic ideology; one that divides, situates, and
identifies. In contrast, D-G call upon
their readers to recognize the impersonality of desire and productive flows,
just as Dennett calls upon his readers to acknowledge the flow of meaning,
meaning as something borrowed and as something affected by the collective
influence of language.
As stated earlier, the politics of this post will likely
overwhelm, discourage, and perhaps offend some readers. However, I am not arguing for a reinforcement
of these views, for the destruction of the individual, or for the political
implementation of measures to collectivize or programs to socialize. I am suggesting a direction that modern
science, technology, and philosophy is headed.
I do not believe this direction is wrong, flawed, or bound to result in destruction. I believe that as science and technology
further develop the decay of the individual, societies and cultures will change
of their own accord. I do not believe
these findings or discoveries are incorrect, and I believe they will contribute
(provided they are allowed to continue) to the burgeoning of a prosperous
future world.
Works
Cited
DeLanda, Manuel. “Emergence,
Causality, Realism.” The Speculative
Turn: Continental Materialism and
Realism. Eds. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, Graham Harman. Melbourne: re.press, 2011. 381-392. Print.
Deleuze, Gilles and
Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism
and Schizophrenia. Trans. Rober Hurley,
Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. New York: Penguin Group, 2009. Print.
Dennett, Daniel. Consciousness Explained. New York: Back
Bay Books, 1991. Print.
Land, Nick. “Machinic
Desire.” Fanged Noumena: Collected
Writings 1987-2007. New York: Sequence
Press, 2011. 319-344. Print.
Pippin, Robert. “‘Back
to Hegel’?: On Slavoj Žižek’s Less Than
Nothing.” Forthcoming in Meditations. Available for download at
“Robert B. Pippin: Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished
Service Professor, University of Chicago.” http://home.uchicago.edu/~rbp1/publications.shtml.
Pollan, Michael. “Some
of My Best Friends are Germs.” The New
York Times. 15 May 2013. Web.
16 May 2013.
Watts, Peter. Blindsight. New York: Tom Doherty
Associates LLC., 2006. Print.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Trans.
G.E.M. Anscombe. Trans./Eds. P.M.S.
Hacker, and Joachim Schulte. West Sussex: Blackwell Publishing, 2009. Print.
[1]
See Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude:
an Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, Trans. Ray Brassier, London:
Continuum, 2011.
[2] I
am drawing here on a distinction made by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition, and quoted by Manuel DeLanda in his
essay “Emergence, Causality, Realism”: “The virtual is not opposed to the real,
but to the actual. The virtual is fully
real in so far as it is virtual […] Indeed, the virtual must be defined as
strictly a part of the real object – as though the object had one part of
itself in the virtual into which it is plunged as though into an objective
dimension” (qtd. in DeLanda 390).
[3] This
reference to Wittgenstein’s texts includes the number of the statement, or
aphorism, rather than the page number.
[4]
This claim might lead to larger suggestion – although I do not have the space
or the expertise to pursue it here – that bodily sensations do not translate
perfectly from speaking to non-speaking beings.
It would be incorrect to speak of fear in early, pre-linguistic hominids
as the same, or even similar, to fear in modern, speaking humans.
[5] We
must not interpret this claim as a misguided concession to esse est percipi. Many
things – chairs, light bulbs, trees, mountains, etc. – do not require their
perception by conscious organisms in order to exist. The claim I am making, rather, is that
consciousness emerges as a unique entity in that it does require its perception
by itself in order to exist. The reason
for this, again, is that consciousness is
self-consciousness.
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