prioritised, thank you

Strictly speaking, the -ise/-ize ending doesn’t depend on whether it’s UK English or US English, but on whether the root of the word concerned is Latin or Greek. The -ise ending can, for etymological reasons, be used with Greek or Latin stems, whereas the -ize ending should really only be used, in strict terms, with words of Latin origin. Unless you are comfortable with classical languages, it is, from an etymological perspective, safest to use the -ise ending. However, if you don’t, and prefer the -ize ending, governments won’t collapse, and mares won’t miscarry in the streets, so use either as you prefer. I use -ise invariably, myself.

Brain “Magic”

“Hello… and welcome to Brain Magic. Some of the challenges we faced in producing Brain Magic were deciding what topics to include and how much information to provide about each piece of brain magic. To partially resolve this dilemma we decided to conduct an initial research study. In July 2004, 3000 people were invited to submit questions relating to what they most wanted to know about how we think and the way our brain works. We then spent several months reading these questions, eliminating duplications and attempting to make sense of the weird and wacky ones! Eventually we sorted them into the following five broad areas: – Brain facts and figures – Understanding how your brain works – Developing your thinking skills – Improving your memory – Keeping your brain healthy The most popular or interesting questions were then selected for further investigation and research, part of which included the involvement of Michael Tipper, a Grand Master of Memory and former runner-up in the World Memory Championship. What will I discover? Well it depends what you already know. We have summarised below more than 50 of the many secrets that will be revealed so you can identify which ones are of most interest: – 3 practical ways to improve your memory – How an “enriched environment” can improve your health – Methods to develop clarity in your thinking – Which foods are proven to develop the brain – How to identify what helps or hinders your thinking – 5 activities that most enrich your brain – How to grow new brain cells – 4 key thinking components that influence your actions – The benefit of increasing blood supply to the brain – How to talk to yourself more effectively – 10 possibility thinking areas you can apply – An activity that can decrease anxiety, improve sleep pattern, moods – 7 key principles of a successful thinking system – How sleep benefits your brain – 6 thinking techniques to improve your creativity – How mental exercise can improve physical health – Ways of overcoming hindering thoughts – The most effective form of exercise to develop your brain – How to increase mental concentration and attention to detail – How to engage your imagination through high quality questioning – How to be happy – How to retain strong mental functioning ability in old age – The “get out of jail” question to ask yourself when times are tough – How to think on your feet quicker Not only will you gain insight and a greater understanding about how you think and ways to develop your brain, you will also get practical tips and techniques that you can immediately apply to make a difference to yourself and others. You will discover how to think quicker, clearer and more creatively on a consistent basis; how to identify and replace hindering thoughts with more helpful thoughts; and how to nourish your brain with specific food, exercise and activities. You will also gain an understanding of what goes on inside your head and the heads of others when certain things happen.

Deleuze’s references (select/relevant)

On friendship as a possibility for thought: Blanchot’s  L’amitie  (use with derrida’s cosmopolitanism?)
Frederick Cosutta – Theory of the concept (analytic?)
Nietzche, The will to power
On Bergson – “Throughout his work, Bergson opposes the scientific observer to the philosophical persona who “passes” through duration. In particular, he tries to show that the former presupposes the latter, not only in Newtonian physics (Time and Free Will chapter 3) but in relativity (Duration and Simultaneity) WIP 227.
Frege, on ‘the interrogative position’ – in Logical investigations. Esp. grasping thought, or the act of thinking; recognition of  the truth of a thought, or judgement; the expression of judgement, or affirmation.
Husserl, Cartesian Meditations re: primordial, intersubjective, and the objective as the three kinds of transcendences that appear within the plane of immanence. esp pg. 55-56.
Hegel, on abstract thought and popular judgement, in Qui pense abstrait?
Badiou, Being and event
Whitehead, Process and reality
Henri Michaux on the ‘health’ peculiar to art. Postface to “Mes proprietes” in Michaux, La nuit remue 1935
Pascal Bonitzer, The cinema Deframing vision/thought – becoming an art by getting rid of the most common emotions: WIP 232
Damisch, Hubert “has insisted more than any other writer on art-as-thought and painting-as-thought such as Dubuffet sought to institute.
Burns, The Uncertain Nervous System
Steven Rose, The Conscious Brain “the nervous system is uncertain, probabilistic, and so interesting”.  [2 key neuro references as well as Changeux]
Lareuelle on non-science/philosophy. “Lareuelle proposes a comprehension of non-philosophy as the “‘real’ of  science”, beyond the object of knowledge” Philosophie et non-philosophie. But we do not see why this real of science is not non-science as well. WIP 234

Malabou’s references

You can’t avoid Deleuze when theorising media spectatorship, thought and cognition. I am preliminarily supposing that a connection between Deleuze and Malabou’s interest in philosophy via the brain occurs as some level through their interest in concepts of transformation (via ‘H’istory) and futurity.

Malabou neuroscience references:
Jean-Pierre Changeux, Neuronal man: the biology of the Mind
Jean Francois Dortier, The Humanities. Overview of Knowledge (1998), and Man, this strange animal. The origins of language, culture, thought (2004). Le Dictionnaire des sciences humaines (2004), The brain and thought, the revolution in cognitive science, (2nd ed. 2004), Une histoire des sciences humaines (2006).
La Recherche (magazine) http://www.larecherche.fr/
Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens etc
Daniel Dennett, Consciousness explained
Marc Jeannerod, Le cerveau intim; and La nature de lésprit and Motor Cognition: What Actions tell the self
Alain Prochaintz, How the Brain Evolved
Alain Trembleau, “La curieuse partition des nouveaux neurones,” La Recherche 367 (September 2003)
Joseph E. LeDoux, The synaptic self: How our brains become who we are
André Green, La Causalité psychique (1995)
Alain Ehrenburg, La fatigue détre soi: Depression et societe
Boris Cyrulnik. Un merveilleux malheur

Post-marx: Luc Boltankski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism

Philosophy: Freud, Bergson, Deleuze, Hegel, Paul Ricoeur, Derrida, Heidegger’s reading of Hegel, Blanchot, Foucault (on Blanchot, and the subject).

Neuropolitics?

[Reading Malabou via Commolly.]

“…the other is our own machine” (Harraway)

1. (Malabou) Considers the politics of conflation of the contemporary (neuronal) subject to the materiality and functionality of the brain; and recognizes the concept of “the brain itself” (inc. the nervous system), as a new/key dispositif of contemporary media and culture.
2. (Commolly) Which brain model is who talking about? Problems with metaphors and easy relational analogies drawn between networks, nodes, synapses, affects, the market, and networked flows of global capital.
   Excitement about brain plasticity can provide a double-metaphor: as radical and conservative flexibility, openness and eternal adjustment.
3. Malabou’s argument: brain plasticity – the neuronal subject’s proven architecture for futurity, transformation, and ongoing change (through learning and the reconfigurement of memory) is formally misinterpreted as flexibility
4. When cognitive models of flexibility are the marketed models of cognition, we see the exploitation of metaphor, and the vulgarization of the concept of brain and mind away from the deconstructive AND dialectical agency of thought itself (i.e. philosophy) i.e. BOTH Derrida AND Hegel (etc!).  (see also The exploit??)
5. Now more than ever, we need to have a philosophy of the plastic, transforming, neuronal (networked/mediating) brain that is more than, but responsive to, its material foundations, and its actual and virtual functions. i.e. FORMING A POSITION
6. How does neuronal subjecthood change or query the history of the theory of the subject – a new ontology in/ via art and media?

Draft Overview – MA thesis

EDIT:  Have updated the below, very slightly.

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In the very earliest gestating stages, so be nice. ;)  Thank you so very much to those who fired off my project ideas with me prior to  this one, back and forth. Thinking-with being part of the interest of my project. 

Brain plasticity, neuropolitics and the posttraumatic subject of media culture

My thesis will utilize Catherine Malabou’s engagement with philosophy (Hegel, Heidegger, Derrida) and neuroscience to explore the rise of the ‘posttraumatic subject’ in contemporary life and media culture, and specifically in light of the concept of brain plasticity as a new ideology and promise informing all range of humanistic and neo-liberal Western conceptions of ‘the subject’. Increasing interest in the West in the post-traumatic subject and this dispositif of the brain itself, emerges in late capitalism at a time of increased (increasingly mediated) proximity to political unrest, natural disaster, spaces of terrorism and ongoing war, conjuncted with greater economic precarity. Part of my thesis will be dedicated to working critically through this greater imbrication of trauma discourse with Western socio-political discourse.

 Malabou argues that the post-traumatic subject of the external event presents a challenge to Western philosophies of the subject and is not considered adequately in trauma theory informed by Freud and Lacan. This posttraumatic subject, argued to be struck not by originary or developmental conflicts but by entirely ‘external’ and ‘surprise’ events with ‘no relation’ to past, childhood, or internal complexes, experiences their own subject-death without meaningful hermeneutic recourse, and lives on, their previous personality and the strength of their cognitions and defenses from the real relatively destroyed. Malabou argues that the twenty-first century will see this posttraumatic subjecthood – characterized by a lack of emotional engagement, indifference and detachment from others, and a life deprived of erotic enjoyment, whether sexual, artistic, religious or sensual - become normative. She uses the term ‘the new wounded’ to speak of this burgeoning category or plight of personhood. While I am suspicious of the positionality of this specifically Western philosophical project, and query the concept of the pure ‘externality’ of the ‘new wounded’s trauma (this being partly a result of non-cognized or un-thought socio-political reality) what is of interest to me is are Malabou’s theorizations of the necessity of philosophy to posttrauma, and her specific concern for thinking through and with the material and psychic destruction of the posttraumatic mind –  specifically the lack of mentalizing and ‘self’-mobilising skills that enable the visioning and processing of the real and the subject over time, via imaginative, ethical relations to others.

Following Malabou, it will be argued that beyond attention to the specificity of trauma, and it’s causes (whether biological, social-political, sexual) scholarship interested in the brain as a dispositif must do the work of thinking through, but most importantly thinking with the posttraumatic subject’s own struggle to thought and being. I will argue that this struggle takes on a common form in posttraumatic subjects, and that this labour of thinking about the post- of trauma in thought remains under-theorised – this being due partly to an aversion to thinking at the level of the subject, it’s positive autonomy, and its ‘causes’ following post-structuralist and specifically Deleuzian thought. In contrast to Deleuze, Malabou distinguishes between a neuronal and mental level of subjecthood and its analysis as part of her ethics. The concept of brain plasticity is newly relevant here as a provocative concept of cognition and plastic, manipulative futurity that adds an extra dimension to philosophical comprehensions of being and becoming (Deleuze), negative dialectics and overcoming (Hegel), by introducing the notion of a ‘brain that changes itself’ or that can be changed. Whereas Deleuze makes few distinctions between the mind and brain, using the brain itself as the aestheticized, positive dispositif of his media aesthetics, the concept of the mind’s own philosophical consideration of and relation to the brain’s plasticity becomes an urgent inquiry for political consideration.

‘Posttrauma’ then takes on a number of meanings in this work: it points to theoretical work remaining in the wake of ten years of incredible scholarship in the area of trauma theory (psychoanalytic, biological, neuronal); it suggests a necessary distinction between the theoretical structurations of traumatized and posttraumatic subjectivity; it engages with the genuine excitement and optimism associated with the recent conjunctions of neuroscience and trauma, and the concept of the subject’s neuronal opening out in to new modes of thought and being in trauma’s wake; and it points to the problematic conjunction, or imbrication, of (Western) trauma discourse and, as, geopolitics.

My own critical engagement with the plight of the posttraumatic subject will pay some attention to the specific structuration of posttraumatic subjects, contexts, and texts via hermeneutic readings, but will focus on thinking the complexity of the posttraumatic subject’s neuronal and mental self-relation and struggle to thought within this self-relation in it’s historical present. I will draw specifically and somewhat provocatively (for trauma theory at least) on new Hegelian approaches to posttrauma, including Malabou and Zizek, as a means of thinking through posttraumatic self-consciousness as aspiration, and as an achievement to-be, and thereby explore a potential Hegelian ethics of recognition, proximity and relation to lesser self-conscious traumatized and posttraumatic beings.  Specific attention will be paid to the subject’s negotiation of the contemporary shift to neuronal identity – the brain and it’s materiality as a dispositif of cultural and self-understanding in contemporary media and popular culture.

In the second part of my thesis I will work the Western biases of this focus on (western) philosophies of posttrauma into a geopolitical framework. A popular youtube film of a brain-damaged neuroscientist, a work of video art by Aernout Mik (tentatively), the film Children of Men (tentatively), and Chris Kraus’ ficto-critical novel Torpor will be employed as exemplary cases of the representation, mediation, and mediating gaze of the posttraumatic subject of contemporary media culture. I will show that the post-traumatic subject has become also a new and problematic symbol of political feeling and sensorial geopolitics in Western art and media. Zizek’s criticism of Children of Men, and Chris Kraus’s ironic use of the the post-traumatic gaze in her ficto-critical novel, Torpor, will be used to illustrate some of the pointed political paradoxes of posttrauma, outlined in Malabou’s project. Working with Malabou alongside these works I will think through Malabou’s approach to an ethics of relating to, and thinking with/for increasing numbers of post-traumatic subjects, arguably, globally. This means exploring the spectatorship of these works – taking the relational aspect of posttramatic representation seriously and from the ‘inside’ of subjectivisation – in terms of this newly arisen question of ‘what to do with the (plastic) brain’, mine and yours, dialectically speaking, and otherwise.

It is hoped that my project will work through and contextualise PTSD, and this theoretical and cultural instance of ‘the brain itself’, in critical theory and as new kind of dispositif and problematic ‘world politics’ of the subject. I hope that it will also set up a broad political and philosophical frame for me to do a cultural analysis of EMDR specifically, down the track.

Holding place

Marcel Duchamp

I need to write about this work at some stage. Holding it here, for now.

Jonas Mekas “online”

…does not equate cinephilia with death. So adorable the intro to his online experiment, archiving the cine avant gard but also posting new minor experiments each day. Mekas’ documentation of a presentation by fluxus provacteur Ben Vautier on December 2, 2007, gives you some idea of how useful and unimportant the internet could be for local art and film histories.

Grounding the MA

The blog has been at rest, and the reading has been too ridiculous and skimmish to recount here in any form. Kraus (Chris), Ranciere, Elsaesser, Anti-oedipal everything, late Lacan, Kittler, sensory media theory (mimesis, discourse networks, affect, video art, Cubbitt, Godard, Silverman, and for light relief, Zizekon the toilet set of psycho  on youtube.

The reason: early March meant thesis commencement meetings. The brain kicking and not kicking in, around certain conjuncted questions about My Topic: specialisation, value (?), values (own), place (Europe / the antipodes), disciplinary feeling (the need to know centres of thought/the need to feel oneself contributing) and a much fuzzier epistemological anxiety that races ahead pretending itself to be a flighty and gorgeous kind of blonde epistemophilia.

I  worry less about the non-utility of these early stages of what might be known as research, than about the rhythm of it  -  the potential for any kind of dialogical feeling just has to register as potential. You can feel and seek this too in the wrong ways (looking for dialogue in all the wrong places). In the absence of “the most likely” topic, surrounded by all kinds of books, I try to ground myself with renewed efforts at focussed + distant browsing and book borrowing, reading stupid e-flux announcements as cryptic clues or potential triggers, and less often, trying to think about all the films and video art works or artists I’ve seen that actually continue to matter aesthetically (without even trying yet to think about how yet, just which ones).  No, I do not mark them up in a little black book; a horrible way to live.

With kc, I have been trying to get my head around the stories people tell about picking their thesis. Want to post/email on this? Perhaps more interestingly what advice did you get at the time, that you still think (or only think now, or  suggest to others) was, is, useful thought – in terms of situating a person + trajectory in to a broader field of academic view? That view being about longer term disciplinary feeling, dare I say the honing of many things, including intellectuality as researcherly self-awareness – developmental work that might assert itself well enough to polish well?

My own pattering concerns have been about the question of making this year’s work connect or not connect to my own pasts and futures. E.g.:  if i only am studying film studies for a year (which is what is “happening”) what do i most want to know about “film” (aka moving images) at the end of it?

Rhetoricals. What role biography / ‘auto’biography (in my experience there’s  not much that’s auto about it) in assisting with focussing one’s longer term committment to research futures? (LB has been blogging about my life again, many lives, and this has been making me think, as usual). Just answer the  questions. Reduce. Containment.

I’ve taken the weekend off, and headed to Rotterdam for eating and film watching, updating all my IT resources, downloading great and shitty films on vuze.com.  Whew. Except that while the boy’s parents are breaking up, and he preps for first trials of his new Summer meds (rare European bi-polar II) (handling both fine), I stupidly watch Rachel Getting Married,  and am crying on the couch from the revelation of every dysfunctional family plot ever, every five minutes, each followed by a montage sequence of adult sisters bathing and dressing each other in formal wedding wear to an original soundtrack produced intradiegetically by musically passionate and super-individuated soulful countercultural blokes. Wrong film.

Emails seem much better for these inbetween times when you have nothing and everything to report. But I wanted to not get into the sharing of anxiety via email too much this time around as I have felt more productively on my own again, less reflective and more Nike style about the whole academic thing, which is fine for coursework, but perhaps not so much for disciplinary feeling, identifactory imaginging.  Impatient aversions still. The irony is I’ve been so useful these past few weeks in helping 5 other friends complete thesis proposals, clarify goals, apply for phds, finish art works, submit book reviews. It really casts a strange light on my relationship to myself lately (and in these paragraphs). Hilariously, I start final course work on Hegel and self-consciousness this week.

Altermodern for comment (please)

What to make of this?

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ALTERMODERN MANIFESTO – POSTMODERNISM IS DEAD

Travel, cultural exchanges and examination of history are not merely fashionable themes, but markers of a profound evolution in our vision of the world and our way of inhabiting it. More generally, our globalised perception calls for new types of representation: our daily lives are played out against a more enormous backdrop than ever before, and depend now on trans-national entities, short or long-distance journeys in a chaotic and teeming universe. Many signs suggest that the historical period defined by postmodernism is coming to an end: multiculturalism and the discourse of identity is being overtaken by a planetary movement of creolisation; cultural relativism and deconstruction, substituted for modernist universalism, give us no weapons against the twofold threat of uniformity and mass culture and traditionalist, far-right, withdrawal. The times seem propitious for the recomposition of a modernity in the present, reconfigured according to the specific context within which we live – crucially in the age of globalisation – understood in its economic, political and cultural aspects: an altermodernity. If twentieth-century modernism was above all a western cultural phenomenon, altermodernity arises out of planetary negotiations, discussions between agents from different cultures. Stripped of a centre, it can only be polyglot. Altermodernity is characterised by translation, unlike the modernism of the twentieth century which spoke the abstract language of the colonial west, and postmodernism, which encloses artistic phenomena in origins and identities. We are entering the era of universal subtitling, of generalised dubbing. Today’s art explores the bonds that text and image weave between themselves. Artists traverse a cultural landscape saturated with signs, creating new pathways between multiple formats of expression and communication. The artist becomes ‘homo viator’, the prototype of the contemporary traveller whose passage through signs and formats refers to a contemporary experience of mobility, travel and transpassing. This evolution can be seen in the way works are made: a new type of form is appearing, the journey-form, made of lines drawn both in space and time, materialising trajectories rather than destinations. The form of the work expresses a course, a wandering, rather than a fixed space-time. Altermodern art is thus read as a hypertext; artists translate and transcode information from one format to another, and wander in geography as well as in history. This gives rise to practices which might be referred to as ‘time-specific’, in response to the ’site-specific’ work of the 1960s. Flight-lines, translation programmes and chains of heterogeneous elements articulate each other. Our universe becomes a territory all dimensions of which may be travelled both in time and space. The Tate Triennial 2009 presents itself as a collective discussion around this hypothesis of the end of postmodernism, and the emergence of a global altermodernity.

Nicolas Bourriaud

Tate Britain Open every day 10.00-17.50, and until 22.00 on the first Friday of the month. For tickets book online http://www.tate.org.uk/tickets or call 020 7887 8888