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January 30, 2005
I, Neurobot
Some thoughts on Badiou (arising from the Dedekind chapter), with an unexpected opportunity to clear some of my archive-vaults:
We get a very clear statement of Badiou's position on 'truth' in this chapter - truth is not calculated or deduced, it is a matter of a decision - very persuasively argued with respect to Dedekind's audacious reversal of Galileo's argument against infinite sets. Where Galileo decided with scrupulous policing instincts that, since for an infinite set such as the whole natural numbers, a proper part of the set could be of the same power as the set itself, one must not think of such sets, Dedekind made his founding axiom this very definition of the infinite, and derived the finite from it.
Another favourite example of mine would be the decision - neither deduction nor calculation - to assume the existence of the square root of -1, 'fidelity' to which decision certainly has massive consequences for mathematics whilst being in some sense strictly undecidable (does sqrt -1 "really" exist? Is the question even meaningful?).
But I am still asking
(a)whether these examples can be analogised to "art, politics and love" (and if so would they constitute more than mere analogies?)
and (b)why are they called 'truths' (rather than, say, 'fertile axiomatic assumptions') - given what a great deal of baggage the word carries, this needs to be explained. I am still convinced that the use of 'truth' stows away a bit of transcendence. It is also not easy to see how such decisive truths relate to the being of that which they decide upon (surely the eternal, exanthropic 'being of number' is not affected, let alone created by such decisions).
My second point concerns the fascinating argument against Spinoza (4.21-4.22)*, where Badiou seems to indicate that a fault opens up in Spinoza's parallelism at the level of what we might call 'secondary ideas'.
Given that every idea is the idea of a body, and given that ideas are able to be reflexive, that is, given the existence of "ideas of ideas", then, Badiou argues, these latter reflexive ideas would have to correspond to something like 'bodies of bodies', the existence of which we cannot conceive (I had translation difficulties with this passage, but I'm fairly certain that's what he's saying). Therefore, the argument runs, Spinoza's use of parallelism fails as a device to obviate the cartesian problems of internality/externality.
This dismissal of the 'body of a body' might be slightly too quick. What is suggested by this 'of'? Not belonging, but appertenance to, reflexivity, or representation, of course. A body of a body would be the function b (to be a body of) applied reflexively. So is Badiou saying that bodily reflexivity is an incoherent concept, that reflexivity or representation can only be thought in terms of thoughts? From a self-proclaimed materialist, this would seem problematic. For, given that we accept the possibility and existence of reflexivity, a materialist needs to allow it to be a property of some material body or other.
I'll now draw on neuroscientist Antonio Damasio's argument, in 'Searching for Spinoza'. A great book, a resounding reproach to the sadness of philosophy: a joyful neuroscience against the dismal legacy of phenomenology (hi, Bloot:), a liberation from ineffable ghosts.
Damasio's argument from neuroscientific evidence (and one shouldn't understate the extent to which Damasio is out on a limb with some of his suggestions - but then, et tu, Badiou!) sets out that feelings are the mental correlates of changes in body-state (emotions) which (in a reminder not only of Spinoza but of Nietzsche also) can precede and cause the rationalisation of the feeling ("the feeling of sadness came after the display of sadness [induced neurally-externally through electrical current]- and only then thoughts of sadness"**)
According to Damasio, the body states that constitute emotion engender feelings, which bring to mind thoughts connected with that emotion, which then can cause "more of" the emotion, "in a process formally similar to a virus entering the body".
There is a kind of abstract 'body map' in the brain, says Damasio. This is not exactly the 'neural homunculus' that was postulated before the birth of neuroscience, but something more distributed and consisting of correspondences more oblique but nonetheless consistent. The map is basically a representative apparatus that provides a transduced image of the state of the body at any moment. At moments of crisis (in response to certain species of sensation), specific combinations of signals trigger the neural reactions we call 'emotions'. Now, although animals have emotions, they do not have feelings. For animals, the experience of the change in body-state, the emotion, as communicated through the body-map, is as far as it goes.
Damasio's argument is that the human brain includes at least one additional level of reflexivity, a monitoring-of-monitoring of the body that makes feeling possible as a second-level reflexive monitoring of changes in emotional (=body) states. In consequence, emotional states can be reverse-engineered by other parts of the brain in the absence of emotionally-competent stimuli; for instance a certain set of high-level suppositions or memories can trigger off a 'sinking feeling' or a 'fight or flight' fear response in the body-map - which in turn can then trigger the emotional state. Retroviral emotion. The body as a reality-amplifier, a nexus of loops of bodily-intelligence, truly a logic of sensation that would justify the magical spinozan immanence of mind, body, and matter. Reality equals simulation (Damasio talks about "as if body-loops"). (I would interpolate here - quite irrelevantly, I know - that given these conditions art can truly aspire to Michel Leiris' formula for Bacon's "realism": "the desire to create something which, at least, has as much weight as reality." And we can fully appreciate the importance of suggestion rather than representation, particularly in Bacon.)
Damasio argues that what is necessary (though not sufficient) to the ontogenic and phylogenic emergence of the mind (consciousness) is the reflexive apparatus of these body-maps in the brain: thus, with Spinoza, the mind really is the idea of the body (not the mind has an idea of the body). Rhythms of sensation, waves of feeling, are constitutive of the subject, body and thought are inseparable.
Once more:
1)The brain is part of the body
2)The body (including the brain itself) is 'monitored' by this neural mapping apparatus (which may in turn be monitored...)
3)The Mind is constituted by the procession of intensities registered in this apparatus
4)so : the mind only exists in parallel with the body; the mind is the idea of a body (or equally, the body is the matter of the mind).
I may go into this in more depth later on, but I think this establishes at least the coherence of the statement that the brain (or a part of it) can properly be called the body of a body, a material organ of reflexivity, in parallel with the self-consciousness of the subject being a 'mind of a mind'.
Ideas of ideas, could quite happily be said to be parallel to bodies of bodies or "matters of matter": they might well, at a high stages of reflexivity, correspond only to neurophysical changes in the brain, but this would not be the same thing as the catastrophic flight to internality that Badiou suggests. Not infinite thought, but the infinite depths of the body. Immanent identity of perception and expression. (Who is it that finds such relief in the peremptory dismissal of parallellism....?)
To be more precise, and put this in quasi-Dedekindian terms, we would have to ask what kind of mapping does the function b "to be the body of" operate, and in what domain? Because if we want to be able to say that second-order ideas, ideas-of-ideas, correspond to bodies-of-bodies, we need to know what 'first-order' bodies are. If a body-of-a-body is b(b), and a (first-order) idea is the idea of any object whatsoever i(x), what is 'x' for a first-order body b(x) ? To which we could offer a tentative melodramatic answer of: its own death, its absolute unbinding.
Rilke's Knight:
Yet, in the armour of the knight,
behind the sinister rings,
Death squats, brooding and brooding:
When will the sword spring
over the hedge of iron,
that strange and freeing blade,
to fetch me from this place
that has cramped me many a day,
so that at last I can stretch myself
and sing
and play?
A body is always the bodying of flux, the capture of energies that are fleeing towards heat-death. A body is a labyrinth of energy, a body of a body is a mazed maze. And a body of a body of a body...., etc.
Zero is cosmic heat-death, the immanent destiny from which we begin our body-count.
I'd like to end this (conscious of having dérived quite considerably, but I have a whole ream of Damasio-related stuff that, having been consigned to the bottom drawer for a while, is delighted to find a way back in***) with a quote from Joseph Beuys:
Brain as the material substrate of thought: an organ of reflection, hard and shiny as a mirror. Once you realize that this is a mirror organ, it also becomes clear that thought finds its consummation only in death, and that thought faces something higher: its resurrection in the freedom that death gives, a new life for thought. And that in the future this can happen in a completely different way; that it is conceivable that in some future age one will be able to think with the knee. And I maintain that one already can.
-----
* I am aware that in what follows I do not draw any conclusion regarding the use to which Badiou puts Spinoza's "problem", for the time being I have simply been intrigued by the argument itself.
** For anyone who's suffered any kind of depression, Damasio's electrodes-in-the-reptile-brain anecdote is wonderfully cheering; freeing you from the compulsion to dredge up reasons for depression: confirmation of Nietzsche's thesis that reasons always follow on behind the unknown, abyssal stirrings of the body .(we do not know what a body can do) Who ever would have guessed it would feel so joyful to be a robot? I, Robot had things round the wrong way - one does not introduce consciousness through programming only to be surprised by the machine's sheepishly asking about its stirring feelings: on the contrary, it is through feelings that consciousness arises.
(Incidentally, I don't have a copy of Damasio so this is all from notes and memory.)
***Reading this classic piece of warwick-madness from 1995 I realised how many pieces of this neo-neuro-spinozan model were in place with 'libidinal ballistics' (but the rigorous connection to emotion/feeling is notable for its absence.) And one important future factor (for me) is the promise of the integration of aesthetics-1 and aesthetics-2 (feeling as in tactile systems and feeling as in emotion and experience, which is part of what I was working on last year. Damasio's models are more sophisticated than the vague 'neural homunculus' hypothesis obviously. As ever, things go in cycles, and are never the same when they return.
Posted by robin at January 30, 2005 06:37 PM