A Posthuman Manifesto

            My interest in the posthuman provokes a variety of responses, but more often than not I get questioned on what exactly the posthuman is, and how exactly it is useful (i.e. practical).  The posthuman, of course, is not simply a study of what might come after humanity; in fact, it more specifically signals an interest in what exactly the human is.  Taking a posthuman stance means not taking the human, and anything we associate with the human, for granted.  It means making no assumptions on what human beings are or do, even on a general level.  It means trying to assess every situation from not only the human perspective, but from (potentially) all perspectives.  Ultimately, we are all entrenched in our own method of thought and knowing, our own observational strategies and informational paradigms – down to the very way in which our senses perceive the world, we are embodied in a way that conditions our interaction with external reality, what Immanuel Kant labeled the noumenal.  A skeptic of posthuman irrationality (which is what it can often appear as) will likely say: Yes, and that embodiment is as a human body.

            But what really is this body that we so presumptuously call “human”?  What do we really know about it?  Perhaps the assumptions we make about the body are not indicative of the way the body really is, but are only our perceptions of the body.  But then, our perceptions are certainly part of the body since they are generated (to an extent) by it; that is, our perceptivity would not be possible without a body to act as a perceiving agent.  We arrive here at the notion of reflexivity, and it is defined in the following way by N. Katherine Hayles in the first chapter of her book How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics: “Reflexivity is the movement whereby that which has been used to generate a system is made, through a changed perspective, to become part of the system it generates” (Hayles 8).  Our own sensory perceptions allow us to generate a system of the body – to systematize the body, to organize it according to a field of knowledge; but those same perceptions are also a part of the system of the body that they have allowed us to create.  Pursuing this tangent, we can lose ourselves down the proverbial rabbit hole, continually halving our frame of reference, only asymptotically nearing zero-level – Zeno’s Achilles chasing the tortoise.  As Hayles puts it less than a page later: “Reflexivity tends notoriously toward infinite regress” (9).

            The impracticality of this conundrum rings too loud for some.  Humans do in fact engage with their world, often successfully, and they do in fact interact with their surroundings in certain ways.  Can we not then admit that it is practical to make certain assumptions about what the human is and about how it behaves?  For the sake of survival and immediate action, I would agree with the previous rhetorical question.  The danger arrives when we expand our assumptions into universalizations; when we become so entrenched in our assumptions that they become absolute.  I call attention to the posthuman, and to its concerns, because I want to remain vigilant on an expansive, general level.  I want to protect us from ourselves – the selves we take to be so human.  It may be practical, at our moment in history, to view ourselves in a constitutive way, to accept as given the manifest image of humanity, in Wilfred Sellars’s terms.  But practicality can change with the wind, and it can be extremely difficult to alter our cultural attitude toward ourselves and our environment when what conditions this attitude becomes universal.

            In this post, I want to cite Hayles’s opening assumptions regarding the posthuman, and offer them (with some explication) as a kind of posthuman manifesto.  There are four total:

1.      “First, the posthuman view privileges informational pattern over material instantiation, so that embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an accident of history rather than an inevitability of life” (2).

This first assumption is a bit misleading considering Hayles goes on to challenge the subordination of material embodiment: “It is this materiality/information separation that I want to contest […] My strategy is to complicate the leap from embodied reality to abstract information” (12).  We must understand Hayles to be constructing a heuristic relationship between information and materiality, rather than allowing information to subsist in an idealistic fashion.  Hayles specifies what she means later in the text, in the chapter titled “The Materiality of Informatics”: “Since the body and embodiment, inscription and incorporation, are in constant interaction, the distinctions forming these polarities are heuristic rather than absolute.  They nevertheless play an important role in understanding the connections between an ideology of immateriality and the material conditions that produce the ideology” (193).  An emphasis on immateriality and information is only possible through specific material conditions, including the instantiation of information in a material body.  Thus, rather than pursue information as a kind of Platonic form subsisting beyond materiality, Hayles seeks to ground the ideal within the material.

2.      “Second, the posthuman view considers consciousness, regarded as the seat of human identity in the Western tradition long before Descartes thought he was a mind thinking, as an epiphenomenon, as an evolutionary upstart trying to claim that it is the whole show when in actuality it is only a minor sideshow” (2-3).

As some of my readers may know, this is a topic that has been on my radar for a while now.  As usual, I turn to my homeboy Peter Watts: “Do you want to know what consciousness is for?  Do you want to know the only real purpose it serves?  Training wheels.  You can’t see both aspects of the Necker cube at once, so it lets you focus on one and dismiss the other.  That’s a pretty half-assed way to parse reality” (Watts 302).  Watts, of course, is a flagrant anti-humanist.  I don’t get quite the same impression from Hayles, or from most literary critics for that matter.  Despite the dawning revelation that we’re little more than chemicals and electricity (Watts’s own description), there still remains the undeniable fact that something rather miraculous happens when we truly try and think about our consciousness.  Even if it is a minor sideshow, it’s a pretty impressive one.  When we begin to consider the historical implications of consciousness – its contingency, its reflexivity – which is also what Hayles is interested in, tangentially (that is, how consciousness can arise from matter), we begin to notice how splendidly incredible it is.  If in my writings I seem to sideline consciousness, to subordinate it to matter, then I apologize, for I am being misunderstood.  I’m more interested in reveling in the utter unlikelihood of consciousness.  From inside the Cartesian theater, it appears as though consciousness must have been preordained, as though life had to evolve this way.  But Watts reminds us that evolution “has no foresight” (303).  It didn’t have to happen.  It was an evolutionary accident.  Whether or not one believes in a divine being, a creator, or not, we can’t deny the truth of the matter: that consciousness as an accident is the true miracle.  This is what, if we’re going to adopt a posthumanist position, we have to come to terms with.  This doesn’t necessitate an anti-humanist position, although there are some (including Watts) who tend in that direction.  Rather, we simply have to consider that consciousness is not the only way for life – even intelligent life – to exist.

3.      “Third, the posthuman view thinks of the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began before we were born” (Hayles 3).

I am always struck when people lament or condemn the prospect of technological implants, the use of enhancing drugs, or the swelling of urbanization while at the same time praising artificial limbs or organs, medical marijuana, or the building of a well in Africa.  Hayles’s third assumption allows us to see how part of what the posthuman view allows us to do is to see how “the human” is never exactly what we think it is.  The divide between the natural and the artificial is more prevalent than ever, and one only needs to look as far as advertising to find countless products purporting to be more “natural.”  This divide, however, can be placed right back into the system itself, per Hayles’s invocation of reflexivity: the divide between natural and artificial takes place within the external environment.  Put more explicitly: the division between the natural and the artificial is itself artificial, and must be done away with.

            Life arose from natural inorganic matter, and human beings evolved naturally.  It makes little sense to draw an arbitrary, artificial line in the sand that marks where humanity suddenly started becoming artificial.  Everything we do and make – our earpiece phones, our ADHD medication, our skyscrapers, as well as our prosthetic limbs, life-saving drugs, and water distribution facilities – is just as natural as the first humans that transported wood on a wheel, or struck fire from stone, or used language to communicate.  In this very important sense, we have always been posthuman.  The human is not something static, something that stays the same; it evolves, it reacts, and it absorbs.  John Gray has evocatively written that “considering our bodies as natural and of our technologies as artificial gives too much importance to the accident of our origins,” and that if “we are replaced by machines, it will be in an evolutionary shift no different from that when bacteria combined to create our earliest ancestors” (Gray 16).  What we might think of as the posthuman imaginary – cyborgs, cyberspace, and technological singularities – is little more than the natural development of what we call “the human.”  This is what I take Hayles to mean when she claims that the bodily absorption or replacement of new prostheses, according to the posthuman view, is part of a process that has been going on not simply before we were born, but even before the advent of civilized humanity.

4.      “Fourth, and most important, by these and other means, the posthuman view configures human being so that it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines.  In the posthuman, there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals” (Hayles 3).

In the work of Nick Land – which must be some of the most intriguing of recent decades, something between poetry and prose, fiction and philosophy, speculative exploration at its best – we get a glimpse of what machinic posthumanity might look like:

The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off.  Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway.  As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip.

The body count climbs through a series of globe-wars.  Emergent Planetary Commercium trashes the Holy Roman Empire, the Napoleonic Continental System, the Second and Third Reich, and the Soviet International, cranking-up world disorder through compressing phases.  Deregulation and the state arms-race each other into cyberspace. (“Meltdown” 441)

Land’s apocalyptic writings are at times enticing and attractive, and at times terrifying, but always riveting.  What readers find in his texts are elements of a posthuman technocracy where the act of authorial creation itself becomes absorbed into the system it describes, thus following the theme of reflexivity.  Land purports to compose what he calls hyperstitions: “semiotic productions that make themselves real” (“Origins” 579).  One of the important aspects of hyperstitions is that their creators do not know they are hyperstitions at the moment of their creation; they appear as merely fictions.  Only in retrospect can they be revealed as hyperstitions.  It is important to note that the term is coined in one of Land’s most obviously fictional texts; that is, the term is coined as a fictional term.  Reflexivity works here in the most convoluted way; a fictional term, coined in a fictional text, but describing fictions that become reality.  In a purely representational way, the term – and the text – merely describes a certain system.  Only through a retrospective feedback loop can the term and text appear as part of the system they purport to describe.  We have to view Land’s work as fiction.  No rational person would claim that his texts accurately describe reality.  But we find within them the description of the system by which they become real.  So now we wait.

            In the aftermath, we will not be able to accurately draw the line between fiction and hyperstition.  There is no telling when the fictional becomes real, or when the text is absorbed into the system that it describes.  In much the same way, there can be no final division between the organic and the cybernetic, or between the human and the artificial – a conflation that appears as the subject matter of Land’s own speculative work.  Humanity, which has striven for so long to distance itself from its technologies, to keep them at arm’s length, to claim control and dominance over them, reorients itself in the posthuman.  It no longer sees its technologies and informatics as something separate, but as something at once constituted and constitutive: we, our environment and historical conditions, constitute the technologies that we create, but these technologies in turn constitute what we are as humans, and what it means to be human.  If we do control them, then they control us just as much.

            We can claim that there is something objective about the way human beings are born into the world.  We do not emerge with prosthetic limbs, or cell phones, or computers, or hammers, or even language.  We absorb and take up these things as we develop.  This we can be most certain of; but we can also be certain that this “state of nature,” in a Hobbesian sense, which we so often privilege and take to be pure, is not better or more valuable than any other later developed state.  If our bodies become poisoned (and this word should conjure an intense ambiguity for those familiar with Derrida’s fantastic long essay, “Plato’s Pharmacy”), or less pure as they mature and develop, this is no less natural than the entirely insufficient and helpless child that exits the womb.

            We are slowly embracing the posthuman, even if while doing so we continue to comfort ourselves with hymns to the ideology of the eternal human soul.  We are slowly embracing the posthuman not because a majority of us are actively pursuing this line of thought, but because the continual development of technology is forcing us to do so of its own accord.  Apocalyptic narratives that envision evil robots or technology run amok are merely examples of the popular imagination attempting to reinforce the bastions of the myth of Man (drenched in all its Western, white, European male self-glory) against the inevitable reality that we are just as contingent as the things we create, the things which create us.  It may be that, right up until the end (whatever this “end” may be), we continue to rebel against the tyranny of technology, to scream against the onslaught of an evolutionary motion that does not care about us, mistakenly believing that we had a destined right to soil, planet, and universe.

            Or, it may be that we come to see ourselves not as the creators of technology, but as its inheritors.  It may be that, through enough willing, reconsideration, and repositioning, we can see ourselves as creature and creator, not as part of a destiny that was designed, but as part of a process that is contingent.  The posthuman is not a philosophy of the end of humanity, or a politics that seeks an end of humanity; it is a way of thinking that allows us to understand ourselves in new ways, that allows us to coexist with the impure and the artificial, and that dethrones us from the pinnacle of evolution not to replace us with something more valuable, but to expose the reality that nothing is more or less valuable.  Perhaps, once we come to see ourselves this way, once we shed the rigid and ridiculous notion of the survival of that reified thing we call “the human,” we may actually find that we can continue to survive in new ways, in different ways, and, perhaps, even in more efficient ways.

Works Cited

Gray, John. Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. Print.

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. Print.

Land, Nick. “Meltdown.” Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007. Eds. Robin MacKay and Ray Brassier. New York: Sequence Press, 2011. 441-459. Print.

-. “Origins of the Cthulhu Club.” Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007. Robin MacKay and Ray Brassier. New York: Sequence Press, 2011. 573-581. Print.

Watts, Peter. Blindsight. New York: Tor Books, 2006. Print.

“That’ll do you for a name”: a Preliminary Thesis on Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren

The text of Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren makes at least one thing about itself hopelessly clear: it is inexhaustible.  It is inexhaustible because it encompasses its own inexhaustibility, mirrors its own limitlessness.  It is a text within a text, and neither one ever appears to begin or end.  The jacket and publication information that bracket the narrative are superfluous.  Nowhere can the text be said to actually start.  As William Gibson writes in his introduction to the Vintage 2001 edition, the novel is a “prose-city, a labyrinth, a vast construct the reader learns to enter by any one of a multiplicity of doors” (Gibson xi).  This enigmatic, circular, reflexive nature has led many readers to speculate on the secret of Dhalgren, the answers to its underlying mystery: what happened in Bellona, who is the first-person narrator/third-person protagonist (are they even the same person?), why is he in Bellona, and what is his damn name?  The novel never says, and there are those who debate whether it has to.  Gibson writes: “Dhalgren is not there to be finally understood.  I believe its ‘riddle’ was never meant to be ‘solved’” (xi).  Many might agree, but I do not, although not in the sense that readers may think.  I do not disagree with Gibson over whether we, as readers, are “meant” to solve the puzzle of Dhalgren.  I disagree that there is a puzzle to be solved at all.

            Assuming the presence of a puzzle implies some order to the chaos.  Dhalgren, much to the contrary, delights in chaos as its basic, most fundamental element, but not an element of essentiality.  Dhalgren rejoices in illimitability.  It celebrates the utopian dream of desire, not the ideological dream of values.  Dhalgren cannot be solved because it is not a mystery, and its author knows this.  Delany knows there is no answer.  The answer does not exist, and yet the bewildered reader will cower before his text in reverential awe, as the nameless first-person narrator (who may or may not be the novel’s nameless protagonist, referred to only as Kid, or Kidd) does before Bellona itself:

I am limited, finite, and fixed.  I am in terror of the infinity before me, having come through the one behind bringing no knowledge I can take on.  I commend myself up to what is greater than I, and try to be good.  That is wrestling with what I have been given.  Do I rage at what I have not? (Is infinity some illusion generated by the way in which time is perceived?)  I try to end this pride and rage and commend myself to what is there, instead of illusion.  But the veil is the juncture of the perceived and perception.  And what in life can rip that?  Is the only prayer, then, to live steadily and dully, doing and doubting what the mind demands?  I am limited, finite, and fixed.  I rage for reasons, cry for pity.  Do with me what way you will. (Delany 583)

This is Delany’s ironic acknowledgement to the reader.  This is his testament to how he knows his readers will approach his novel.  This is Delany laughing.  His text will do with its readers what way it will, but its way will not be Delany’s.  He leaves his text, abandons it upon putting down his pen for revisions (which, as certain students of literature will know, are yet to be completed).  It is no longer his.  Delany is the deistic clockmaker who built the machine, wound it, and sat back to watch while nursing a drink.  Trying to wind Dhalgren back up from within is an exercise in futility, and trying to discuss every aspect of the novel is impossible in the amount of space a blog affords.  I would prefer to discuss the novel’s profound position in the history of American literature and Science fiction, and what it possibly represents for American culture.

I. “A city came to be…”

            In his introduction, Gibson calls Dhalgren a “literary singularity” (xi), and he contextualizes this singularity within an abstract scope of American history: “No one under thirty-five today [the introduction is dated: August 23, 1995] can remember the singularity that overtook America in the nineteen-sixties, and the generation that experienced it most directly seems largely to have opted for amnesia and denial” (xii).  The singularity that Gibson speaks of is the emergence of a city in America, but not a city that could be spatially or geographically located (although temporally/historically, somehow…).  Gibson’s comment is worth quoting in full because of its suggestive and obscure qualities:

But something did happen: a city came to be, in America.  (And I imagine I use America here as shorthand for something else; perhaps for the industrialized nations of the American Century.)  This city had no specific locale, and its internal geography was mainly fluid.  Its inhabitants nonetheless knew, at any given instant, whether they were in the city or in America.  The city was largely invisible to America.  If America was about “home” and “work,” the city was about neither, and that made the city very difficult for American to see.  There may have been those who wished to enter that city, having glimpsed it in the distance, but who found themselves baffled, and turned back.  Many others, myself included, rounded a corner one day and found it spread before them, a territory of inexpressible possibilities, a place remembered from no dream at all. (xii)

The city that Gibson describes is not real in a geographic sense, but rather symbolic of a larger cultural phenomenon.  This phenomenon is not readily accessible to representation, and remains semi-impervious even to the perception of typical America, or Americans.  In my reading, it is something countercultural, but even this may be too structural.  It is an elusive flow of energy, a release of pressure that escapes measure.

            The historical moment of the 1960s will most immediately be recognized through appeals to Vietnam, the Cold War, the hippie movement, free love, Woodstock, LSD, and other various ‘60s tropes.  However, Fredric Jameson identifies another important development, along with the poststructuralist movement in French theory: the “emergence, in the [artistic] work’s temporality, of an aesthetic of textuality or what is often described as schizophrenic time; the eclipse, finally, of all depth, especially historicity itself” (Jameson 500).  Jameson acknowledges here the theoretical emphasis on surface, and its subsequent erasure of any previously considered substantial content.  That is, he claims that the 1960s inaugurates the full-fledged theoretical moment in which culture comes to be composed of simulacra masquerading as signs for something beyond them; but here, even the term “masquerade” is problematic since it suggests something behind the mask.  In contrast, Jameson declares, the 1960s revealed that the surface had subsumed its purported content.  Furthermore, history, as a (traditionally) teleological study of progress and development, and as a declaration of origins and purposes, is exposed as a narrative laid over an impossibly intricate network of cultural interaction and upheaval.  The narrative no longer explains history in some scientific or objective sense; it betrays itself as artificial.  This is the textual trick that Dhalgren plays on its audience.  It invites speculation as to the true nature of its contents, the secret it conceals; but it conceals nothing.  Everything we need to know is on the surface, presented in the infinite circulation of the narrative.

            The city that comes to be – the city that Gibson claims emerges in the 1960s, and that Delany will represent in his 1974 novel – is a city so complex that it appears it must house some secret, some core that readers yearn to find.  The joke is on us, as far as Delany is concerned, and this is what remains “invisible to America”: that the textual knot is insoluble because it is not a knot.  Delany’s city is a burst of unharnessed Deleuzian energy that evades the territorializing of Western culture, a radical representation of what lurks beyond the limits of Western democratic capitalism (Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus was published only three years or so before Delany’s novel):

Capitalism therefore liberates the flows of desire, but under the social conditions that define its limit and the possibility of its own dissolution, so that it is constantly opposing with all its strength the movement that drives it toward its limit.  At capitalism’s limit the deterritorialized socius gives way to the body without organs, and the decoded flows throw themselves into desiring-production. (Deleuze and Guattari 139-140)

Despite D & G’s difficult terminology, the basic import of their argument can be deduced: beyond the limits of institutional capitalism, the flows of productive energy are no longer coded and begin to feed into desire itself.  We find something similar in Dhalgren.  In Delany’s Bellona – a place where the police are absent, and the closest thing to any semblance of Law are roaming bands of thieves and thugs known as Scorpions – and beyond the structures and strictures of America, capitalist labor is almost entirely absent.  The only instance of it appears when the unnamed protagonist gets a temporary job moving furniture for the Richards, a typical middle-class family desperately clinging to the remnants of the American dream.  In one scene, Mrs. Richards describes the difficulty of creating a traditional American home:

“That’s something that a woman does from inside herself.  You do it in the face of all sorts of opposition […] You must make it your own world.  And everyone must be able to feel it.  I want a home, here, that looks like my home, feels like my home, is a place where my family can be safe, where my friends – psychologists, engineers, ordinary people… poets – can feel comfortable.” (Delany 226)

The most tragic characters of the novel, the Richards embody the pressures of the American lifestyle in a place that, while in the country of America, is not American.  Bellona is a fictional city, and its relationship to the remainder of the country is ambiguous.  It stands for something that America cannot internalize or categorize, and those who survive in it practice behavior at odds with the traditional patriarchal, heterosexual, hegemonic structure.

            In Bellona, sexual restraint is virtually nonexistent, a space where characters can not only engage in homoerotic behavior, but can openly discuss it.  Many of the characters sleep with multiple partners, and Kid even participates in ménage à trois on several occasions.  In Bellona, the “tenebrous city, city without time, the generous, saprophytic city,” that which America codes as unnatural, or abnormal, can be practiced without reservation or fear (382).  Rather, it is the traditional that becomes fragile, as Mrs. Richards demonstrates through her admission of fear: “‘Why do you think we moved into the Labry [apartments]?  Do you know how I thought of this moving?  As a space, a gap, a crack in which some terrible thing might get in and destroy it, us, my home.  You have to take it apart, then put it back together.  I really felt as if some dirt, or filth, or horrible rot might get in while it was being reassembled and start a terrible decay’” (227).  Despite Mrs. Richards’s acceptance of Kid, she fears much of what he stands for.  Her hesitance to allow poets under her rubric of “ordinary people” testifies to this.  Ultimately, the Richards appear as an anomaly in Bellona, and tragedy befalls appropriately; not because the Richards are morally deserving of punishment, but because Delany presents their fragile values as inviting tragedy.  In this obscure place beyond traditional societal borders, only tradition can be tragic.

            Bellona – the city that came to be, the autumnal city – is a city of exiles.  This basic paradox informs the contradictory pressures that occupy the novel’s majestic prose.  A place of urban desolation, it allows for unrestrained sexuality and violence; but Delany saturates everything in an unnerving surrealism that suggests some underlying anticipation or tension.  Bellona, the city of exiles and free love, is also the city of madmen and brutality.  Delany does not pretend that his fictional city is a utopian paradise of a libertarian variety.  Rather, it is a difficult anarchism, an anarchism still coated in the residue of Western values, and it is only through the presence of these lingering values that discussions on race and sexuality are able to take place.  George Harrison, accused of rape and blessed (or cursed) with the namesake of a second moon that mysteriously appears in the sky, explains his controversial view of the “interesting kind of rape,” in which, he insists, the women enjoy it: “‘It’s the kind they always have in the movies.  It’s the kind your lawyer friend was trying to make this other thing into.  And when it gets to the law courts, it’s a pretty rare kind.  But it’s the one they all afraid of – especially between little-bitty white girls and big, black niggers’” (210).  This description sounds only too familiar and revolting to readers today, but in Dhalgren it dissipates with little objection, even from Lanya, the novel’s most energetic female character and Kid’s occasional lover.

            Similar discussions occur regarding race and homosexuality, such as the conversation between Tak and Fenster.  When Tak claims to have a “black soul,” Fenster objects: “‘You can’t have one,’ Fenster said.  ‘I’m black.  You’re white.  You can’t have a black soul.  I say so’” (294).  When Tak says that Fenster “‘[comes] on pretty white,’” Fenster retaliates: “‘Scares you I can imitate you that well’” (294).  Recalling Homi Bhabha’s notion of colonial mimicry, Fenster calls the essences of black and white into question.  The two characters then proceed to argue over who holds a greater claim to alienation: Fenster because he is black, or Tak because he is gay.  An exercise in futility, the entire argument concludes with Tak admitting that in his “relentless battle for white supremacy,” he has again been bested (294-295).  Again, the presence of American values – lingering though they are like cobwebs in an abandoned cellar – affords the possibility of political debate; but conclusions are uncertain, and they are often dismissed with relative apathy among the characters.

            Dhalgren translates a historical moment into a topographic abstraction; an interrelation of city and cosmos that is separated from the real America by a kind of prism, or lens (perhaps a further clue to the title of Dhalgren’s first section, ‘Prism, Mirror, Lens’), refracting sunlight into apocalyptic swaths of nuclear explosions and multiplying the number of moons in the sky.  Yet all its invocations of typical Science fiction tropes are not what make Dhalgren a work of Science fiction.  Its science-fictionality, rather, is achieved by what Gibson calls its “territory of inexpressible possibilities,” which I liken to the world of “infinite possibilities” described by the unnamed narrator of Ralph Ellison’s American classic, Invisible Man.  In many ways, Dhalgren is a successor to Ellison’s canonic text, conceptually and thematically (both novels explore issues of race and American culture, and both authors conceive of their narratives as somewhat circular).  The utopianism of Dhalgren, like the utopianism of Invisible Man, does not manifest as the representation of an ideal society.  Bellona cannot be described as an ideal state, a place where human beings might willingly go.  It is, as I have already said, a city of exiles; it is a place where people are forced to go.  Although this might contradict the rather dismissive attitude with which some characters decide to visit the city, I claim that Bellona functions as a structural necessity.  It is the invisible city described by Gibson, the topographic symbol of a historical mentality – the revolutionary capacity produced by the political unconscious.

II. “Science fiction.  Only real…”

            In a scene from the section titled ‘In Time of Plague,’ Kid and Tak discuss possible explanations for why Bellona has come to be as it is.  Why the desolation, the abandonment, the isolation?  After suggestion that it might be some kind of government experiment or ecological catastrophe, Tak offers a fresh take: “‘Actually […] I suspect the whole thing is science fiction’” (372).  Kid immediately jumps to the conclusion that Tak means it has something to do with time travel and alternate realities, but Tak denies this: “‘No, just… well, science fiction.  Only real.  It follows all the conventions’” (372).  In the dialogue that follows, Tak distinguishes Kid’s notion of Science fiction from “‘the new, good stuff’”; new Science fiction (good Science fiction) follows three specific conventions that do not necessitate laser guns and spaceships:

“First: A single man can change the course of a whole world: Look at Calkins, look at George – look at you!  Second: The only measure of intelligence or genius is its linear and practical application: In a landscape like this, what other kind do we even allow to visit?  Three: The Universe is an essentially hospitable place, full of earth-type planets where you can crash-land your spaceship and survive long enough to have an adventure.  Here in Bellona […] you can have anything you want, as long as you can carry it by yourself, or get your friends to.” (372)

Even in this relatively simple language, the meaning of each of these conventions proves elusive; but Tak outlines something important for understanding Dhalgren’s relationship to Science fiction literature.  The novel follows only one character – Kid – who has a profound impact on Bellona after his arrival.  Although the novel is certainly non-linear, the reader can only approach its subject matter in a linear fashion.  The application of knowledge proceeds in a linear manner in an attempt to make sense of the shifting realities and topographies of the city.  Finally, when all is said and done, Bellona appears to be a very hospitable place.  Most of the characters welcome Kid, some even accepting him as their leader.  All these conventions present themselves in Dhalgren, but Delany transplants them into a scenario that exposes the critical core of good Science fiction: an abstraction that communicates something very real, a blight in the mind of middle America, an apocalyptic wasteland that reveals the underbelly of cultural repression.  Bellona is not real in any topographical sense, but it is real in a historical sense, and this is the revolutionary power of the novel that Gibson identifies in his introduction.

            Bellona, the unreal city, possesses the utopian potential that Fredric Jameson theorizes in Archaeologies of the Future: the Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions.  In this monumental text, Jameson deploys the notion of utopia not as a material unit of societal production, but as an exception to the rule: “The ‘moment of truth’ is thus not a substantive one, not some conceptual nugget we can extract and store away, with a view towards using it as a building block of some future system.  Rather its function lies not in itself, but in its capability radically to negate its alternative” (Jameson 175).  Bellona cannot function as a contender for a possible utopia.  It presents itself as a space where utopian attitudes and practices can take place without punishment or condemnation.  Its continually shifting topography reflects its ability to relentlessly negate any and every alternative that presents itself.  Race, gender, sex… these things all still exist; but their discussion and exploration is abstracted from the cultural fear that surrounds them and drowns them in real America.  Bellona is not only a hospitable place for adventure, but also for political discussion.

            If Bellona is not a physically attractive place, even to the most liberal-minded reader, that is because it does not attempt to realize a utopian society.  It is purely and completely an abstract rendering of the utopian attitude, for those willing to indulge it (the Richards, especially Mr. and Mrs. Richards, are most clearly the characters who refuse to indulge it).  The prospect of actually living in Bellona would no doubt frighten most readers, but this is Delany’s challenge.  If we wish to truly pursue utopian ideals, then we must brave the consistently changing landscape of the utopian attitude, which is always making room for new perspectives and alternatives.

            No law sanctions the violence that ensues from the vicissitudes of utopianism, but this does not mean that Bellona has no rules.  Kid learns this early in the novel, after attempting to scale the wall of the estate wherein lives the mysterious Roger Calkins.  After being beaten up by Scorpions for no apparent reason, Kid admits to his friends that he was trying to look over the wall of Calkins’s place.  This evokes an explanation from Tak: “‘It’s a strange place, maybe stranger than any you’ve ever been.  But it still has its rules.  You just have to find them out’” (87).  Tak’s statement suggests that the rules to Bellonian society cannot be explained or codified; they must be discovered on a case-by-case basis.  Occasionally, certain unspoken rules must be reinforced through violence.  This kind of post-apocalyptic, Mad Max-esque scenario appears unnerving and unattractive at first, but an appealing innocence underlies the novel’s violence, even in its most tragic instances.  Following Tak’s third convention, even Bellona’s most violent moments are succeeded by a sense of hospitality.

            Reverend Amy Taylor, a minor character, gives voice to Bellona’s further hospitality, proclaiming in her sermon, delivered in the section titled ‘Creatures of Light and Darkness,’ that logicians love Bellona (472).  Reverend Amy’s sermon occurs intermittently over a space of about ten pages, but her subject matter continually returns to a kind of metaphysics of Bellona, recalling Tak’s second convention about linear reason and logic.  In the same section as cited above, Reverend Amy explains: “‘Here you can cleave space with a distinction, mark, or token, and not have it bleed all over you.  What we need is not a calculus of form but an analytics of attention, which renders form on the indifferent and undifferentiated pleroma’” (472).  Reverend Amy’s speech is largely indecipherable, being composed of an odd but poetic mixture of theological mysticism, philosophy, and physics:

“Is God a sow who devours Her young and gets heartburn?  Is God the garter-snake Ouroborus, gagging on the tip of His own tail?  Or is God just a category-concept mistake, like Ryle’s mind, a process the materia of the universe performs, indulges, or inflicts on itself, through necessity of chance, for arcane reasons you and I will never discover?  Being is a function of time, ‘ey Martin?  Well, now, where does that get us?  Now seems pretty specious to me… for it’s just a hole, a little hole on whose rim we’ve been allowed, for an eye’s blink, to perch, watching that flow, terrible for all of us, tragic for some of us, in which the future hisses through to heap the potter’s field of the past.” (470)

Reverend Amy prostrates herself before the yawning chasm of Bellona, similar to those readers who balk before the monstrosity of the novel itself.  Instead, she turns her listeners’ attention toward their impending doom: “‘How long did the light last?  Oh, my poor, sick, doomed, and soon to be obliterated children, ask instead how long is the darkness that follows it’” (470).  Her sermon exhibits a certain hopelessness in applying logic to the phenomenology of Bellona, but she finally persists in what might be a certain faith in logic: “‘Pray that this city is the one, pure, logical space from which, without being a poet or a god, we can all actually leave if –’” (481).  The line ends abruptly, but the impact remains.  All one can do, Reverend Amy suggests, is pursue existence in Bellona and pray that logic somehow conforms to reality, just as the narrator (see citation from p. 583 above) claims that his only prayer is to go on “doing and doubting what the mind demands.”

            Reverend Amy’s sermon, however, plays out largely in the background, and assumes no identifiably influential role in the action of the narrative.  Kid continues on his obscure mission, oblivious to the impending doom that the Reverend warns about.  Upon finishing the novel, one might conclude that the Reverend’s fears were in vain; but this only holds if one ignores the possibility that Kid is the impending doom, the apocalypse, the revelation.  And he is only ever impending because he never truly begins or ends, if one buys the novel’s circularity; he has “come to to wound the autumnal city” (801-1).  But his coming is never complete; it is always becoming.  Kid may change the course of an entire world, but he can only do so by becoming caught in a process where he is eternally evanescing.  The repetition of “to” between the novel’s first and last pages is worthy of consideration.  At first it seems to be nothing more than a repetition whose intended meaning is simply: “I have come to wound the autumnal city.”  But this ignores the possible alternative meaning if each “to” is given its own syntactical weight: “I have come to to wound the autumnal city.”  That is, he has come into being, into creation, in order to wound the autumnal city.  His becoming is one of eternal trauma, eternal return, forever circling the center that would perhaps grant him identity and meaning.  The Science fiction hero, the man who changes the world, thus emerges in Dhalgren as a vacant subject, a subject whose most important feature – the identity, the I, the name – is subtracted from him.  His name is never hinted at, but I would venture one definitive claim: his name is not Dhalgren.

III. “Grendalgrendalgrendal…”

            So who the hell is William Dhalgren?  The name occasionally appears on a list of names in the notebook that Kid acquires.  We first see this list when Lanya asks if any of the names belong to Kid; in the right column, four names from the bottom, appears “William Dhalgren” (63).  The name never sticks with Kid.  The name might belong to the interviewer who appears in the novel’s sixth section, titled ‘Palimpsest’; but readers are only told his first name, which is William.  His last is never verified.  Dhalgren’s most important appearance certainly comes in the novel’s final section, when Kid hears a monotonous sound while he participates in a sexual encounter with several other characters: “‘Grendal, Grendal, Grendal…’” (678).  Kid later realizes he was attributing inception to the wrong syllable, and that the speaker was actually saying, “Dhalgren” (679).  The misinterpretation also calls to mind the name of the monster from the Old English epic, Beowulf; but application of the mythic cycle to Delany’s novel seems fruitless.  Dhalgren is assigned to no one, a floating signifier without any content or actor.  What function does the name play?  Is it a name at all?

            Following the concept of Dhalgren itself, we must end where we began.  “Dhalgren” means nothing.  Even if the text contains a code that unlocks the secret of Dhalgren and the unnamed protagonist, this is secondary.  The narrator’s realization that he misheard Dhalgren as Grendal reveals no hidden essence; all it reveals is that misinterpretation is the only certainty.  Grendal, Dhalgren, Kid, Kidd, William… begin where you choose.  Dhalgren does not mind, because it does not contain the key to the code.  This is its true literary and revolutionary potential.  It invites its readers to experience the sheer Science fiction of chaos, and to encounter there limitless utopian possibilities.  Dhalgren cannot give any answers because answers would only obscure the radical nature of the “ganglial city” (219).  Bellona is not for 20^th-century scholars of American history, or the politicians of liberal democracy, or the economists of global capitalism.  Bellona is the shadowy space that these institutions create.  It is the dark aperture that even the most radical of us have difficulty perceiving.  It is that which cannot be coded into the structures of society, yet which makes those structures possible, and appears among them as an absence, an omission – something exiled.  In the nation of television and Hollywood, Bellona – the powerless city – appears only as a blank space: “Neither television cameras nor on-the-spot broadcasts function: that such a catastrophe as this should be opaque, and therefore dull, to the electric nation” (14).  It is the unconscious city, the “vague, vague city,” the city “‘struck out of time,’” that accompanies the cultural consciousness (382, 469).  The repressed and invisible city.  The city that America does not want to see.

Works Cited

Delany, Samuel. Dhalgren. New York: Vintage, 2001. Print.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert     Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. New York: Penguin, 2009. Print.

Gibson, William. “The Recombinant City: a Foreword.” Dhalgren. New York: Vintage, 2001.      xi-xiii. Print.

Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: the Desire Called Utopia and Other Science           Fictions. London: Verso, 2007. Print.

–. “Periodizing the 60s.” The Ideologies of Theory. London: Verso, 2008. 483-515. Print.

The Ghost in the Machine: Speculations on Consciousness (a Sequel)

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.

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[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.