Abstract
If today one must be absolutely materialist, to echo Arthur Rimbaud’s dictum, the neuro-turn imposes the question: which materialism? For, as I show in relation to broader society and the neurosciences themselves, materialism is invariably accompanied by its shadow of virtuality. One radical critique would be that the neurosciences fail to realise their own claim of materialism, because they lean, unwittingly on psychological paradigms. In this chapter I engage in a critical dialogue with Adrian Johnston, and his attempt to supplant the psychological rationale of neuroscience with a psychoanalytic one. My contention is that Johnston not only psychologises psychoanalysis, but also adopts a problematic naturalized materialism. In contradistinction to this, I propose that psychoanalysis deals with a decentred materiality, a materiality of Lacan’s object a.
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Notes
- 1.
I’ll expand on this highly fashionable but equally highly contestable distinction in Chap. 7.
- 2.
In this respect, we could immediately criticise Panksepp’s taxonomy by taking recourse to a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective. Lacan famously rejects the psychologising approach to emotions, and proposes that there is only one affect that does not deceive, that is, anxiety (Lacan, 2004, p. 41). In this way, any taxonomy of emotions is bound to be ridden by imaginary and symbolic—and thus fundamentally deceptive—pre-conceptions. The question of whether anxiety itself could be localized in the brain (be it in a specific area or in a dynamic network) loses its relevance in light of Lacan’s argument that anxiety is “not without its object”. That object is not the alleged reality of materiality of the brain but, rather, pertains to Lacan’s object a which directs us towards a different understanding of reality and materiality. This is the argument I develop in the remainder of this chapter.
- 3.
Saxe, Carey, and Kanwisher (2004), for example, ground their neurological theory of altruism in developmental psychology, while at the same time the authors they refer to ground their developmental theories of altruism in neurological views.
- 4.
See, once again, Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiment and its central interpellative phrase “Now that you know, how do you feel?” for an archetypal example of this. For an in depth analysis see (De Vos, 2009a).
- 5.
Lacan speaks of “la guérison comme bénéfice de surcroît” (Lacan, 1966a, p. 323).
- 6.
See Chap. 5 where I critically engage with the work of Malabou.
- 7.
Johnston writes: “In yet other words, and to employ the simplistic nature-nurture pair, the human natural Real is a nature naturally inclined towards the dominance of nurture over nature—evolutionarily pushed into pushing back against evolutionary pushes, genetically pre-programmed for epigenetic reprogramming, and neurally hard-wired for more-than-neural rewiring” (Johnston, 2015b, p. 154).
- 8.
In Ovidius it is only gods and demons that can switch back-and-forth between metamorphoses, while mere mortals in most cases cannot undo their metamorphosis.
- 9.
If the neurosciences put the humanities under pressure, threating to colonize their fields with its invading paradigms, then it can also be said that the neurosciences only lay bare the always already existing aporia of the humanities. Consequently, the neuro-turn does not engender a crisis within the humanities, it merely unearths a pre-existing crisis. It is this which represents the great virtue of the neurosciences, and should perhaps be their raison d’être.
- 10.
Johnston’s position is as follows: “It also would be a profound disservice to so many other areas of investigation (in the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities) standing to benefit, however much they would acknowledge this or not, from philosophical and psychoanalytic insights” (Johnston, 2015a, p. 167).
- 11.
I use the terms psychologisation and neurologisation in a slightly different way here than in the previous section (where it concerned the imposition of the neuropsychological on modern subjectivity). In this paragraph, I primarily designate with psychologisation and neurologisation how neuropsychology comes to dominate other praxes and discourses. On how these two aspects are interconnected see (De Vos, online first, 17 October 2014).
- 12.
Of course, here the Foucaultian concept of biopolitics is altogether too limited, as one could argue that what the neuropsy-complex demonstrates, contra Foucault, is that it is not only forms of sovereignty which are in play, but also issues pertaining to infrastructure and state-apparatuses (such as those involved in management and policies concerning education, parenting, mental health care, employment, etc.). In this respect, see Agamben (1998) and my own critical assessment (De Vos, 2013b).
- 13.
Even though Freud tried to situate psychoanalysis fully within a scientific paradigm, his continual struggle with this positioning led Lacan to propose that psychoanalysis was most certainly not a science like the others (Lacan, 1966b).
- 14.
In Žižek’s understanding of the term, we are dealing with a parallax here: the apparent displacement of an object caused by a change in observational position (Žižek, 2006b).
- 15.
Lacan’s “parlêtre” means literally “speak-being”.
- 16.
Johnston writes: “Following Žižek’s employment of Freudian-Lacanian Nachträglichkeit/après-coup, I perceive transcendental materialism as a new development ‘creating its own past’ in the form of a history that explicitly comes into view only retroactively, after the fact of the advent of this newness” (Johnston & Gratton, 2013).
- 17.
Johnston writes: “fictions actually steer concrete instances of cognition and comportment, they are causally efficacious. And, hence, they are far from epiphenomenal qua eliminable fantasies … In other words, subjects and their (virtual) realities are concrete, real abstractions that not only walk amongst us, but, in essential fashions, indeed are us” (Johnston & Gratton, 2013).
- 18.
Consider the tedious and repetitive reference to our alleged past as hunters and gatherers, as if the whole of human history can be traced back somehow to this surmised critical episode in human evolution.
- 19.
Perhaps one will allow me to discern the following positions in relation to mythology and cosmology. Firstly, we have Johnston, whose recourse to the biological sciences and the life sciences leads to a genetic and perhaps, we might even say, a vitalist approach, as he grants the final word and ultimate jurisdiction to the natural sciences. In contradistinction to this view we find Žižek’s flirtations with quantum physics. This amounts to a kind of parallelism, inasmuch as the same mechanisms are discerned at the quantum level as in the realm of the subjective-symbolic, which eliminates the aforesaid hierarchy of jurisdiction. Alongside this we find a third position—which I only briefly mention here because a full engagement lies beyond the scope of this chapter. I am referring here to Alain Badiou’s philosophy and, more specifically yet still, to Ed Pluth’s defence of it: here the relation between nature and the human-historical world is considered as a non-relation, or at least, as an un-eventful, meaningless relation (Pluth, 2015). Considering the issue of jurisdiction in terms of this latter position, one could argue that jurisdiction is diverted to a purely mathematized science: ontology, for Badiou, is essentially a mathematical matter (the knowledge of the natural real is ultimately within mathematical formulas). The crucial question here concerns how far the jurisdiction of psychoanalysis qua decentred materialism extends? Whilst the standard answer would likely limit its jurisdiction to the psychoanalytic cure, the wager put forward here is that, as the human is a speak-being, the jurisdiction of psychoanalysis thus covers the entire sphere of the human as such, which is to say the sphere of what is in the human-more-than-the-human.
- 20.
On non-psychology see also De Vos (2010).
- 21.
For a more critical engagement with Massumi, see Chap. 7.
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De Vos, J. (2016). The Material Brain: A Plea for the Uselessness of Psychoanalysis. In: The Metamorphoses of the Brain – Neurologisation and its Discontents. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50557-6_3
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