Sunday, January 8, 2012

Excursus: The Ghost in the Machine or the Machine in the Ghost?


Not deus ex machina—the ghost in the machine (cf. Arthur Koestler)—but the machine in the ghost. If an earlier era of psychology and psychiatry struggled somehow to extract consciousness from the machinery of the brain, today’s neurosciences go directly to the machinery. To paraphrase the Latin, machina pace deus. Or, ghosts, consciousness and other ephemera notwithstanding, let us at the machine! The discovery of endorphins (Sol Snyder) and mirror neurons (Vittorio Gallese, et al) are perfect examples of this. We have a neuropharmacological or neurophysiological finding (“the machinery of the brain”)—now let’s look for clinical analogues (“the ghost,” subjective experience, phenomenology). With endorphins, it was endogenous mechanisms for pain relief or “pleasure centres” and their relevance to explain everything from addiction, pain, and self-mutilation; with mirror neurons, the speculative fury ranges from a neurophysiological basis for René Girard’s mimetic theory, to a biological substrate for empathy and language acquisition, all the way to modeling autism.

Let me put it differently. The two canonical images of the ghost in the machine, stories about the conflict between λόγος (logos) and θος (ethos), are Frankenstein and the Golem. Today, if Mary Shelley were rewriting Frankenstein, she would have to offer at least a plausible (or crowd-pleasing) scientistic theory of how Dr. Frankenstein’s monster was actually created. Something to do with genetic engineering, no doubt. Not bodies stolen from the graveyard but grown from the petrie dish. The Maharal, Prague’s writer-rabbi who invented the Golem would have to rewrite the screenplay not as a metaphysical version of Tarantino’s kitschy Inglourious Basterds (2009; the Golem is in fact a revenge story built on anti-Semitic prejudice and persecution), but the Golem as a modern Trojan horse, a trojan virus in fact, called “Golemnet” (cf. Stuxnet), employed by the Israelis to defeat the Iranian nuclear menace. In Hollywood tropes—Munich meets The Matrix. The “scientific” backstory would become the drama. The ethical, moral or even political dimensions would be addressed with clever but one-dimensional plot devices with urgent warnings about technology out of control.

We don’t have to invent movies to make this case: Contagion (2011) has no point of view other than the mechanics of a pandemic, the global transmission of a virus, in a high-tech disaster movie. This is a minor plot device in a larger story in The Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), which also makes my point. In creating a new backstory for the planet of the apes, two scientific ideas are employed: genetic manipulation (the Frankenstein/Golem story, in effect) and when it goes awry, the spread of the mutation by global travel (the Contagion story told in a neat one-minute capsule at the end). To conclude, today’s popular narratives are more preoccupied with the machine than metaphysics, reflecting the dominant discourse of science and technology today. (Cf. Catherine Malabou, Les nouveaux blessés and Patricia Churchland’s neurophilosophy). An exception is The Matrix (1999), inspired by Baudrillard’s ideas—a real meeting of science fiction and philosophy.

When ghosts linger in the popular imagination, they are, as Badiou writes, aggressive phantoms. Like The Matrix, both Inception (2010) and Shutter Island (2010) are about the mind, memory and the spectral presence of the Other in what becomes in both films a return of the repressed. Neither film concerns an event. Both concern the reactive subject.

Is there a recent film that is about rupture that does not become a disaster or a moralizing tale about technology gone awry? Yes, the surprising film, The Adjustment Bureau (2011), based on a Philip K. Dick short story. Something that was not predictable and not according to “the plan” overseen by the “Chairman” occurs. Against all odds, David Norris the main character persists in his fidelity to this unforeseen event—meeting a woman with whom he falls in love—and stakes everything on making it happen again and maintaining it.

Badiou on the Event - “Only Nothing is Anonymous”


Besides being a philosopher and a literary and music critic, Alain Badiou is a poet, playwright and novelist. This brief excerpt from his novel, Calme bloc ici-bas - Calm Block Down Here, shows that events are contingent and must be named. Out of this, we become subjects in our fidelity to the event. 

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… Élizabeth Cathely et Céline Isaïa, masquées et puant l’essence, galopent sur le pavé à trois heures du matin. Elles viennent d’incendier une camionette judiciaire dans la cour d’une annexe de la Légation. « Merde, dit Élizabeth, enchantant le mot dans le sombre orage de sa voix, on a oublié de larguer le tract. »  « C’est pas très important, dit Céline, ce genre de truc est signé “robertiste” automatiquement. » Mais Élizabeth se fâche : « Ce qui arrive, tout ce qui arrive vraiment, doit être signé. Il n’y a que rien qui est anonyme. »
—Alain Badiou, Calme bloc ici-bas, p. 383

Alain Badiou. Calme bloc ici-bas: Roman. Paris: P.O.L éditeur, 1997.


… Elizabeth Cathely and Celine Isaïa, masked and smelling of gasoline, are running on the road at three o’clock in the morning. They have just set fire to a police van in the parking lot of a police station. “Shit,” says Elizabeth, savoring the word in the dark thunder of her voice, “we forgot to drop off the pamphlet.”

“It doesn’t matter,” says Celine, “this kind of thing is automatically signed, ‘For Robert’.”

But Elizabeth bristles: “What happens, everything that really happens, should be signed. Only nothing is anonymous.”

—Alain Badiou, Calm Block Down Here (my translation)

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In this short exchange in his novel Calm Block Down Here, Badiou’s view of the event is in full evidence: an event must be named—“Only nothing is anonymous.”

“The Revolution Will Not Be Traumatized”


This mini-essay is a response to the seminars with Drucilla Cornell and Étienne Balibar at the Birkbeck College Critical Theory Summer School in London in 2011. I was rereading Sartre to better understand his support for violent revolution and wrote this ...

“The Revolution Will Not Be Traumatized”

            On se revolte par haine, on devient révolutionnaire par raison. Les deux en même temps.          
            —Jean-Paul Sartre

            We rebel out of hate, we become revolutionary through reason. Both at once.
—Jean-Paul Sartre (my translation)

My insight into why revolution will not happen until we address the question of the intergenerational transmission of trauma explains why I chose a career in psychology and psychiatry rather than in politics and philosophy. My disquiet stems precisely from the way Sartre expresses his ambivalence in the word-pairs, “rebel-revolutionary” and “hate-reason”—experienced simultaneously. Trauma will not yield event and hate will not be transformed into reason. We will have much hate and much rebellion and revolt, with intifadahs and uprisings to spare. Mimetic desire and the scapegoat mechanism (cf. René Girard) will ensure that the hate will be propagated and disseminated. But they will create a chasm that will not be breached.

When all of the conditions are met for a revolution (cf. Étienne Balibar), we will still be left with our hate, as Sartre stated, our ressentiment—about which Nietzsche wrote so forcefully—and our traumas, as the contemporary world teaches us, will reduce us irredeemably to bare life in a perpetual state of exception (cf. Giorgio Agamben).

“The revolution will not be televised,” wrote Gil Scott-Heron in a famous American poem and song of the 1970s. You will not be able to stay home, there will be no instant replay, slow motion or still life and no re-run, he advised his listeners. In a brilliant riff on Madison Avenue advertising slogans, the revolution will not “be right back after a message,” and no one will be concerned about “a dove in your bedroom,” “a tiger in your tank,” “the giant in your toilet bowl” or “germs that may cause bad breath.” It will, however, “put you in the driver’s seat” because “the revolution will be live.” Scott-Heron’s song was a wake-up call to all those who were asleep in the mediatized, pacified life of television where traumas are passively relived: “There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down brothers in the instant replay.” A revolution has to be lived, has to become an event that we must name and be faithful to, not vicariously experienced on television (cf. Alain Badiou). The traumatized subject is not “a kind of survivor” (cf. George Steiner), nor is the revolutionary “a bourgeois reformer,” as Sartre had the courage to admit about his political activities in his later years (Gerassi, 2009/2011). You have to be there to risk being traumatized; you have to show up for the revolution. That is why I say, the revolution will neither be televised (passive), nor traumatized (foreclosing change)—or it will not be a revolution.