Chaos Is the Natural State of Your Mind, Research Time, 20/02/2018

Researching Utopias, it's a book of ethics as well as politics and political theory. As it should be. Any political inquiry mixes questions of ethics and morality – Who are we? and What do we owe each other? respectively.

Any comprehensive book of ethics will need a conception of the subject underneath, an ontological one. If I’m going to explore questions of character, I’ll need to know what the limits and potentials of the human character are. Or at least, I’ll need a solid, dependable picture of those limits and potentials that will – at minimum – be a decent set of premises someone can consider for the sake of the wider argument.

This post comes from some notes I took on an old essay by Félix
Guattari called "Schizo Chaosmosis."

So where did I develop my general conception of the subject, of selfhood? Well, in my case, I’m picking up what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari threw down.* It’s a fairly complex concept, but holding it doesn’t prevent me from engaging with anything else in philosophy or broader human science.

* Not wholesale, but with a suitable grounding in the basics of medical, neurological, and psychological science, as well as some input from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological thinking. But those converge more closely than you might think from stereotypes about the field.

If anything, it gives me a better grounding than researchers in the humanities whose knowledge is more discipline-bound. Guattari has a reputation among the more closed-minded majority of North American scholars as a freak opposed to real scientific inquiry.

But that’s a ridiculous stereotype – Guattari wrote like a freak, but he was a dedicated medical scientist.** He was a psychiatrist who worked with near-permanent in-patient schizophrenics. Severe schizophrenics.

** See, Merleau-Ponty researched The Phenomenology of Perception with detailed help from cutting-edge neuroscience research in the major research hospitals of Paris. He built his materialist phenomenology from some of the most influential studies of brain injury in the 20th century.

What did Guattari learn about the nature of human subjectivity from working with schizophrenics? He understood the chaos that’s always roiling inside each of our supposedly rational minds.

Learning the scientific knowledge and skill of so many thinkers
who too many mainstream North American philosophy departments
consider anti-scientific helped me realize something in my own
writing. I can be as experimental as I want in my own philosophical
work, and how I express myself. But not all the time. And carefully.

This isn't a matter of Freudian sub-conscious. The Freudian model of the mind is inherently rational – the talking cure is cure by understanding the origins. As soon as you figure out the root cause of your neuroses – the driving principle of your personal narrative – you’re cured.

Add to that, the whole point of Anti-Œdipus. Freud and the Freudians mistook the images that arose from Sigmund’s contingent practices – these patients from this city at this time in history – for universal organizing principles of human consciousness.

At La Borde, Guattari saw something much more obviously visceral, animal, dangerous, and fascinating than symbols and arguments. Schizophrenia – especially in the midst of a serious, intense breakdown – is the removal of all restraint on thought. It’s the closest humanity can get to pure chaos.

Guattari worked this out from studying his patients’ actions – how they thought and lived. Contemporary neuroscience has uncovered an appropriately literal cause of the condition – schizophrenics have a severe shortage of the neurotransmitter that inhibits our thoughts.

He saw the raw, unfettered force of the human personality. It was the liberation of a person from every constraint they had – everything they learned through enculturation and education was inconsequential. The schizophrenic was totally free.

Guattari also saw that the schizophrenic was a total basket case, unable to function in the world at all. His therapy – aside from stabilizing drugs – was accustoming them to social life through routine involvement in the operations of the clinic. Doing laundry, cleaning up, playing games, helping make meals.

Literally re-socializing them. That’s why it’s always a mistake to read Deleuze and Guattari as saying that to deterritorialize is freedom itself. Being totally deterritorialized is to become chaos – pure high-energy entropy with no limits. That’s no life. It’s an explosion.***

*** The cutting-edge neuroscience research at the heart of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy couldn’t have happened without so many patients with so many different brain injuries. France had plenty – war veterans who had shrapnel slicing up different parts of their brains. No need for a dubious ethics board application to study serious brain injuries – the Second World War gave them all the patients needed and then some.

Guattari's was an ethical and political medical practice. He treated schizophrenia by re-socializing people – rebuilding their characters as better versions of themselves. Versions less likely to fly apart again.

The Meaning of a Meaningless Coincidence II: Who I Am, Composing, 23/07/2015

Continued from last post . . . One concept, the subject as field. Merleau-Ponty developed this idea through philosophical work on the phenomenology of tactile perception. I picked up this concept and adapted it into my ecological conception of the subject, the heart of Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity's program of philosophical eco-activism. 

Violence was central to so many of the metaphors and
images that Marinetti would use to explain his art,
politics, philosophy, and the whole of existence.

Marinetti developed the concept through his artistic reflections and experiments on tactile sensation. What’s more, he conceived those sensations as playing out in experience through metaphors of fistfighting. Marinetti always comes back to violence.

Writing traditional philosophy, I would have to dismiss this as a simple coincidence. Marinetti had no historical influence on Merleau-Ponty, so there's nothing here to learn about the history of philosophy.

But I’ve given up writing philosophy according to the conventions and rules of academic practice. EEFH was assembled according to the old rules (though I did push them a little), but Utopias will be a much more experimental text. So we can approach these coincidences as something to learn from. What can we learn?

We can learn something about human nature. The same concept of how the world is, the subject as field, arises in two thinkers independently, through two different means. Marinetti was always a fiercely patriotic soldier, he believed in the power of violence as an expression of strength and nobility, and he understood the field in terms of its power for violence.

Merleau-Ponty was a professor, always rather sedate. Much of his career was spent teaching philosophy, researching philosophy in libraries, or investigating neurological and perceptual science with France’s leading medical scientists and doctors. He died of a heart attack after writing only a few chapters of The Visible and the Invisible, the book where he would have explained in detail his concept of the subject as a dynamic field. 

His scattered, yet detailed, notes suggest that he would explain one important aspect of his touch-centric phenomenology as a worldly eros. We experience the world by touching it, commingling with it, everything literally penetrates everything else. 

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was in many ways a
very peaceful man who lived a very peaceful,
contemplative life. Would that we all could.

This integration fuels the dynamic processes of existence. If Husserl’s vision-centric phenomenology was haunted by solipsism, the separation of the subject from the world, then Merleau's focus on touch conceived of the subject as intimately integrated with the world. 

The entire life of existence – its dynamisms, processes, generations, becomings, changes, natality, creativity, whatever you want to call it – is driven by the blending of objects as their fields touch and mingle.

So two very different conceptions of what a subject is sit at the centre of these philosophies, even though they share the same starting concept, that touch is the primary way in which bodies interact. 

Marinetti prioritizes violence and the power of industrial technology to crush all other orders of existence. So he develops an ethical and political philosophy of conquest, empire, and domination. Ecological sustainability and diversity is my priority, so in Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, physical contact integrates us with the world, so that we come to love it as we love ourselves. 

We understand and conceive of our desires, hopes, fears, and dreams in universal form by building philosophical systems out of the concepts we use to understand the world. Our individual desires, hopes, fears, and dreams condition what concepts will occur most readily to us. We study the accidental common ground of two unrelated and very different thinkers so that we can better understand the machinery of human thought and ethics. Contrasting the coincidence, we understand better who and what we are.

The Meaning of a Meaningless Coincidence I: Questions, Composing, 22/07/2015

In the early days of Adam Writes Everything, when I was still very uncertain what precisely this blog was going to be, especially its content and tone, I wrote a couple of posts under a category called “Triangulation.” They were essentially comparisons of different thinkers and ideas.

Eventually, I decided not to write these anymore, because they didn’t actually seem very fertile for developing ideas. And they didn't seem all that engaging for readers. These are the two questions that I ask myself about whatever I post here. 1) Will writing a post push a vague idea in a creative direction or otherwise help me figure out something that puzzles me? 2) Would someone actually enjoy reading it?

Those early posts just plunked two coincidentally similar ideas next to each other. Sometimes, two or more writers discussed the same topic, and sometimes, one writer actually influenced the other and I wanted to think about how. But coincidences don’t really make good philosophy.

The influence of Marinetti's Tactilist art appears in a
decadent and depraved American Hollywood film.

Here’s an example. I noticed an odd coincidence reading an old Marinetti essay the other night. He was discussing the framework of a new approach to art that he called Tactilism. It was artwork that you were supposed to experience not by looking at it or listening to it, but by rubbing your hands over it. They were panels whose material was designed to the smallest detail to provoke a particular tactile sensation.

Marinetti described how he first thought of this idea when he was a soldier in the Great War, serving in the battles against Austria. He was stumbling through a trench in total darkness trying to find a place to sleep, his hand passing over dirt, metal, clothing, flesh. He realized that this was a whole new way of seeing the world, through touch. 

We hardly ever think about just how detailed our tactile sensations can be. So he developed a form of art that would emphasize tactility, let us develop our hands to higher capacities of perceptivity than we typically do.

As Marinetti thought about what touch actually was, he came to understand it as the fundamental sense. All other perceptions – visual, auditory, olfactory, proprioception, and so on – were derived from the basic nature of touch. All perception is detection of objects around us and moving through them. Touch and avoidance of touch.

It occurred to me that Marinetti’s insight, which he developed in the context of his artwork, was fundamentally the same as Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s when, in the last years of his life, he developed a philosophy of perception that saw touch and physical contact as foundational to all experience. 

Merleau-Ponty was working in the sub-discipline of phenomenology, particularly the tradition of Edmund Husserl. Merleau’s work during and shortly after the Second World War built on and expanded many of Husserl’s ideas, rooting them in a scientific context as research on brain injuries* discovered the complexity and depth of perception’s interdependence with neural architecture. 

Unfortunately, there are still plenty of opportunities
to study the effects of shrapnel head injuries on
human perception.

* The Second World War, particularly its flying shrapnel, produced many examples of traumatic brain injuries that were quite valuable for the growth of humanity's knowledge, even as their sufferers struggled to return to a worthwhile life.

I remember one professor I had as an undergraduate, who thought Merleau did little beyond expanding Husserl’s yet-unpublished papers. Merleau's mid-career work often ran into the same fundamental problem that Husserl did: how to get out of the subjective perspective. 

Merleau overcame this through a simple shift in focus from analyzing vision as essential perception, to touch. From there, he developed the conception of the subject not as a viewer, but as a field constantly interacting with other fields and bodies around her. This concept of the subject as a field of affects integrated in a huge complex of overlapping fields is the lynchpin for the conception of the subject at the heart of my ecological philosophy writing.**

** I’m in the process of booking my in-person and virtual speaking tour to promote Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. So more details coming to a campus near you.

Marinetti mentions this concept of the subject as a field as a logical derivation from his own reflections on the perceptual primacy of touch and tactility. He arrived at this profound, revolutionary philosophical concept through thinking about art. 

Here, we have two solitary figures with no actual historical relationship where Marinetti could have influenced Merleau philosophically at all. We only have their coincidental development of the same concept. Why bother thinking about it at all? To be continued . . . 

Self-Production: A Body of Continual Genesis, Composing, 28/03/2014

Yesterday, I went back through the chapter of my Ecophilosophy manuscript that wrapped up the project, working on some edits and developing some notes for my formal book proposal. I had planned to get the proposal finished earlier this month, but then it turned out that moving apartments took quite a lot of logistical effort. And I wrote a play.

But revisiting this project reminds me of some of the solid philosophical ideas that I developed for it, and the value of these ideas for other people to pick up. Even if it just amounts to a discussion on the blog for a while, I’m interested to work out these ideas in public, and maybe encourage a reader to think a little differently. After all, that’s what philosophy is for.

A prominent example of self-producing bodies are simple
organisms, compared to which even an amoeba is
ridiculously complicated.

One concept that was central to this project is that of the self-producing body. The minimal condition of the existence of the self is an auto-producing process, a process that literally creates and maintains itself. There is a very facile argument against there being self-producing bodies. I often find myself incredulous that I have to argue with such a view at all.

Here’s how it goes. The very idea of a body being able to produce itself is self-contradictory. If a body produced itself, then it would have already had to exist before it was produced. Therefore, a self-producing body is impossible.

Of course, anyone who actually studies even any of the basic principles of the biological science where this idea (its technical name being autopoiesis) arose, will see how ridiculous this argument is. The type of body that can produce itself isn’t like an android arm on an assembly table putting its other parts together. It’s a complex of chemical reactions that, once they get started, produce a physical boundary that stabilizes the chemical reaction that produced it in the first place. That’s the kind of ‘self-production’ I’m talking about. One of the problems with keeping argumentation to very abstract and very simple contexts is that, if you simplify your thinking enough, everything turns to straw.

I reference phenomenological philosophy in the manuscript, particularly the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, for several reasons. One of those is that an environmentalist version, called ecophenomenology, conditions a person to think in terms that are more receptive than humans usually are to understanding themselves as integrated and interdependent with the processes and affects that surround them. Of course, it isn’t perfect in doing so — any phenomenological perspective is going to concentrate too heavily on the primacy of the subject to be truly and completely ecological. But its eco- version can bump you in the right direction. I think of it as a tool with which you start, but that you should leave behind. 

Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Like all my influences,
nobody's perfect.

Merleau-Ponty’s own thought, especially in his final years, I find has a lot of potential for the de-centring of the subject and subjectivity that I found in Deleuze’s thought, and that is vital to the Ecophilosophy project. But one of his more problematic concepts (along with his premature death, before he could develop these directions in detail) kept him rooted in the primacy of the subject, that of pre-reflective consciousness. The argument that there must be a pre-reflective consciousness goes something like this. 

Human consciousness is reflective. But if human consciousness were entirely reflective, there would be nothing prior to the act of reflection to do the primal reflecting. Therefore, there has to be a pre-reflective element of human consciousness, which is always hidden from our experience, because human consciousness always exists in a pre-reflective mode. 

Am I the only one who saw that this has the same form as the facile argument against auto-producing bodies? A body cannot produce itself unless something of it existed to produce anything in the first place. A consciousness cannot reflect on itself unless there were something of it there to reflect in the first place. Consciousness is actually a process more like autopoiesis than intentional, physical construction. It’s an assembly of many processes that, in their very coming together, stabilize themselves and better enable those processes to continue. 

That’s essentially my argument against having to port the concept of pre-reflective consciousness along with the other ideas in Merleau-Ponty’s thinking that I think work — what it presumes is unnecessary. In a fundamental way, consciousness and perception does not work in the particular way this argument would imply. It is far more complex.

Is Mind Over Matter If Mind Is Matter?, A History Boy, 25/07/2013

A long time ago, in the last year of my undergrad and during my MA at Memorial (from about 2004 to 2007), I knew exactly what kind of philosophy I wanted to work in, what stimulated the most interesting ideas in me, and what could benefit most from those ideas. Philosophy of mind.

My friends might be surprised. But I wrote my MA thesis in philosophy of mind, considering one possible answer to the problem of materialism. This is the problem of whether the world is entirely material or if there is a second substance of mind. Aside from this one approach to materialism/dualism I was considering, all the various thought experiments and problems on the subject fascinated me. Yet there was an element of this sub-discipline of philosophy that would become very difficult for me. 

All those more minor thought experiments and problems had developed such vigorous debates that they became their own sub-disciplines of philosophy of mind (itself already a sub-discipline). Everyone in philosophy of mind operates in these sub-disciplines; it isn't that kind of specialization. But when I would meet other practitioners of philosophy of mind at guest lectures and conferences from around 2007 to 2009, they'd tell me that the ideas developed in one debate didn't apply to another. Yet I kept coming up with ideas for projects that would apply, say, an idea from the materialism-dualism debate around Donald Davidson's Swamp Man to the identity theory debate around Swamp Man.

In the case of the perspective I took in my MA thesis? I chose the most unforgiving example of the typical materialist point of view in the last decades of the debate: Paul and Patricia Churchland. What if this kind of strict materialism could still permit processes that create all the intentionality, subjectivity, and inner life that we think dualists need the mind substance to do? What if I could find a set of ideas that generated all the phenomena we call mind from plain old matter? I could conclude that the conflict of materialism and dualism wasn't necessary; we could be minds made of matter. I'd just need to find a set of ideas that I thought could generate all that from material and walk you though how that happened. And I thought I knew exactly the philosophy that could do that: phenomenology, particularly the ideas of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception. That book gives you the tools to walk through how a complete human personality develops from the material stuff of an organic body. Phenomenology is the perfect non-reductive materialism.

Yes, it did start as something of a joke (Swamp-Man, Swamp Thing). Then
I realized that Alan Moore's Swamp Thing character dealt with issues of
identity and memory central to philosophy of mind. 

Even before I had any idea whether it was appropriate, I was genre-mashing in philosophy. And I still do. This post isn’t for getting into my takes on the divisions and categories of philosophical disciplines (spoiler: I don’t like most of them!). But my greatest philosophical successes in the last five years have come from these genre collisions. I apply traditionally continental thinkers to analytic problems, just as in my MA thesis, or yesterday when I wrote how Thomas Nagel could learn so much from Henri Bergson. And I apply analytic thinkers to typically continental problems: Ian Hacking has a lot to teach Bruno Latour and the Foucauldian philosophers of science. I’ve even gotten philosophical success and peer-reviewed publications from seeing what philosophy and literature could learn from each other. I have an essay under review at a critical theory journal, which I’ve also presented at the Canadian Philosophical Association, that makes heavy use of H. P. Lovecraft to understand an aspect of the interaction of mysticism and science. I published an essay in Cogency this summer that critiques the problem in analytic theory of knowledge on the rationality of peer disagreement by drawing ideas from Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. I had an idea to get back into philosophy of mind last year with an essay that explores different aspects of Donald Davidson’s swamp-man thought experiment, taking it in new directions thanks to engaging with the ideas from Alan Moore’s run on the Swamp Thing comics in the early 1980s. I haven't started on it yet, because there's so much material in philosophy of mind alone to constantly catch up on. I've spoken about the idea with my friend D, who does philosophy of mind. One day, if he's still amenable, we can actually get started writing that essay together.