Amsterdam School 1920s social housing

Facticity, Heidegger->Levinas

[Which is not the same sort of coupling of facticity-towards/from-the-outside that I was writing about....I don't think - Heidegger's sense of the body's thrownness into the world via time, comprehended as fascism as an ontology of pure presence...I am sort of fascinated by presence as this sort of ontological-moral error, and the way that dialogues with the hyper-affectivity of ptsd and other affect-disordered states, livelihoods.]

In Homo Sacer, (Agamben) PART THREE: THE CAMP AS BIOPOLITICAL PARADIGM OF THE MODERN 88

Precisely this immediate unity of politics and life makes it possible to shed light on the scandal of twentieth-century philosophy: the relation between Martin Heidegger and Nazism. Only when situated in the perspective of modern biopolitics does this relation acquire its proper significance (and this is the very thing that both Heidegger’s accusers and his defenders fail to do). The great novelty of Heidegger’s thought (which did not elude the most attentive observers at Davos, such as Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas) was that it resolutely took root in facticity. As the publication of the lecture courses from the early 1920s has by now shown, ontology appears in Heidegger from the very beginning as a hermeneutics of tactical life (faktisches Leben).

therapy /ethics – in Commolly’s Neuropolitics

Commolly’s view is rather moderate and feelgood, and doesn’t say much about translation/modularity/incommensurability even, of knowledge systems. But it sort of covers some of the ground I was trying to point to in prev. reply. i.e. contra Kant/Foucault,  I would say some ‘therapies’ and ‘care of the self’ practices (things dismissed as them) are sometimes knowledge systems just incommensurable with Western ones, or underdocumented/theorised without critical mass-literacy/practice. This is commolly in Neuropolitics:

To call a tactic of the self a “therapy” in the neo-Kantian tradition today is to quarantine it from morality because it falls below action governed by deliberation and the moral will, even though Kant himself maintained a modest role for “gymnastics” in the moral life as he conceived it.The difference between therapy and ethics, to me, is not that the first adopts a variety of arts for shaping thought-imbued affect while the second operates through the will and intellectual principle alone. Both therapy and ethics in practice draw upon both intellectual capacities and arts of the self. And each is often experimental in the strategies it adopts to reorganize affect. The differences between them are less blatant and elsewhere. Ethical artistry, in its highest forms, is work applied by the self to itself to render its relational proclivities more congruent with principles it professes, or to build up resistance to oppressive institutional disciplines, or to modify a relational pattern of thought or judgment that seems closed, or to put the self in the position of responding more generously to newly emerging identities that call into question the self’s implicit sense to embody in its mode of being the dictates of the universal. Ethical work is typically experimental, since it usually occurs in new contexts where established codes show themselves to be too blunt and crude and new patterns of visceral judgments have not yet been consolidated. You do not know exactly what you are doing when you participate in it. But such work is not merely experimental, it is also, as we saw in the last chapter, ubiquitous. We are constantly being bombarded by multimedia tactics applied to several layers of being, and we regularly develop strategies to work on ourselves in modest ways not incorporated into the intellectualist narratives of moral theory.
To appreciate the ubiquitous role of tactics, exercises, and artistry to ethical life, it is necessary either to extend the idea of therapy beyond the treatment of neurosis or to distinguish ethical exercises from therapeutic interventions by attending more closely to a host of corporeal practices already bound to the ethical life.

Hippie analytics

One of the pleasures of reading neuroscientific texts for those highly attuned to “the body” and any depth of Eastern philosophy, is that you keep coming up against aha moments where something you might have long ago experienced or discovered, or ‘been told’, i.e. by a discourse/ text not recognised in the Western academy, or even _always thought_ about [insert the dubious: "energy" fields, transference, flesh-based memory and activity, the strange architecture of the sensory field] is validated.  I can’t seem to emphasise how important these kinds of weird bio-cultural/philosophical moments of validation have been for me in the past couple of years (but also earlier) given that  my subcultural encounters with sexual and ABSTRACT body politics were part of a very Butleresque period of cultural anlaysis and experimentation. i.e. “The body” was big. But which body, what body, was never elaborated biologically, neurologically, i.e. anywhere below the skin or within “the mind”. Now I don’t necessarily need to become a tantric yoga teacher to learn more. Although I’m not sure why that’s a good thing.

Here below is what seems to be (gasp) the chakras in Ramachandran.

The “sensory homunculus,” as it is now called, forms a greatly distorted
representation of the body on the surface of the brain, with the parts that are particularly important taking up disproportionately large areas. For example, the area involved with the lips or with the fingers takes up as much space as the area involved with the entire trunk of the body…, presumably because your lips and fingers are highly sensitive to touch…whereas your trunk is considerably less sensitive, requiring less cortical space. For the most part the map is orderly though upside down. However…upon close examination you will see that the face is not near the neck, where it should be, but is be- low the hand. The genitals, instead of being between the thighs, are located below the foot.12

When I was in chicago last year, I was informed by a masterly accupuncturist that limping around on a broken foot halfway around the world had not only misaligned my hips (what I was seeing her for) but also that my “base chakra” (aka the point in space that corresponds to your sexual energy/organs, and that is usually situated/drawn about 10cm below and between  your two feet, equidistant) had been pushed more than a foot off to one side. She stuck needles in me and put her hands on my feet and my hip warmed up and moved back into position all by itself (which I felt over a period of a bout 10 seconds). Instantly, I was also no longer homesick / travel weary, which gives another, part-Freudian inflection to “grounded”.

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.