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.