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Incognitum Hactenus vol. 2 A Critique of Practical Nihilism: Agency in Scott Bakker’s “Neuropath” Mark Fisher During the twentieth century, nihilism seemed to be a collateral counterpoint to the processes of rationalization both of production and of the State. That is to say: on one side, labour, on the other, the precariousness and changeable nature of urban life. Now, however, nihilism (the practice of not having established prac tices, etc.) has entered into production, has become a professional qualification, and has been put to work. – Paolo Virno[i] “The whole reason I wrote the book,” Scott Bakker remarked of his novel Neuropath, “is that the question of cognition and experience is rapidly shifting social domains, moving from armchair speculative arenas to scientific and technical ones. ... Just ‘getting on with your life’ becomes a far different matter when corporations like Neilsens are investing billions in startups like Neurofocus. Nihilism is as practical and as present a problem as can be.”[ii] “The idea,” Bakker elaborated in a paper called “The End of the World As We Knew It: Neuroscience and the Semantic Apocalypse”, “was to write something set in a near-future where now nascent technologies of the brain had reached technical, and more importantly, social maturity, a time where the crossroads facing us–the utter divergence of knowledge and experience–had become a matter of daily fact. A time when governments regularly use non-invasive neurosurgical techniques in interrogations. A time when retail giants use biometric surveillance to catalogue their customers, and to insure that their employees continually smile.”[iii] What I want to consider here are some of the implications of this “practical nihilism”. Must the “semantic apocalypse” that Neuropath herald inevitably lead to political pessimism? The plot of Neuropath centres on two friends, Thomas Bible, a psychology professor, and Neil Cassidy, a neuroscientist. When they were undergraduate students, they came up with what they called The Argument, which basically consists of a version of the 5

Incognitum Hactenus vol. 2 philosophical position known as eliminativist materialism. Eliminativist materialism goes further than those theories which argue that the mind can be reduced to the brain; for eliminativists like Paul and Patricia Churchland, such reductions still assume the existence of beliefs, fears, hopes and all the other mental categories seemingly revealed to us by introspection. Eliminativists maintain that such entities do not exist at all. They belong only to what they eliminativists call “folk psychology”, and instead of vainly searching for neural correlates for these will ‘o’ the wisps, eliminativists argue that we should look forward to a time when neuroscience will entirely replace the vague language of feelings and beliefs with a language appropriate to what actually happens in the brain. Consciousness, free will and other “intentional” features of human experience are fictions cooked up by our own neurophysiology. “[E]xperience, all experience, is simply a matter of neural circuitry”, as Bible succinctly summarises in Neuropath.[iv] Or, as he puts it at greater length, Everything you live, everything you see and touch and hear and taste, everything you think, belongs to this little slice of mush, this little wedge in your brain called the thalamo-cortical system. For you, the road is as wide as a country road should be, the sky is as wide as it can be. But in fact your visual connection to these things is smaller than the nail of your pinky. When I clutch your hand, the experience comes hundreds of milli-seconds after the fact. And all the neural processing that makes these experiences possible - we’re talking about the most complicated machinery in the known universe - is utterly invisible. This is where we stand in the Great Circuit that embraces us: out of sync, deceived, as fragile as cobwebs, entombed in a hardwired cage: powerless. This expansive, far-reaching experience of yours is nothing more than a mote, an inexplicable glow, hurtling through some impossible black. You’re steering through a dream .... (N 108) The novel’s action turns on the (personal and professional) differences between the two men. Bible is an academic, and for him the Argument remains at the level of a parlour game – something he wheels out to discomfit and scandalise laypeople, but which does nothing him living his life as if it didn’t matter. Cassidy, meanwhile, has been performing neurosurgery for the security services. For him, the capacity to radically adjust and even obliterate subjectivity and consciousness has ceased to be a matter of merely theoretical speculation: it is a fact of his working life. (In some respects the dynamic between the two men resembles that between the James Stewart character and his two young protégés in Hitchcock’s Rope – Stewart’s professor cheerfully proclaims Nietzschean doctrines at dinner parties, but is shocked when his students actually act upon them. The principal difference between this and the situation in Neuropath, of course, is that Bible and Cassidy are peers.) For reasons that are never fully explained, Cassidy sets about depriving Bible of his capacity to function normally. He wants to tear down the screen separating what Bible experiences from what he knows. Cassidy performs a series of neurosurgical demonstrations on people loosely connected with Bible – making a porn star experience pain instead of pleasure; giving an evangelical preacher intense religious experiences; making a politician 6

Incognitum Hactenus vol. 2 into a cannibal; tweaking the neurology of a plutocrat so he is unable to recognise faces - before wiring Bible himself into a machine (called Marionette) which cycles Thomas through a series of traumatically anomalous neurological states. The great enigma in the novel is why Cassidy does this: why does he go to such sadistic lengths to prove to Bible what he already knows? The novel scrolls through a number of potential motives – including sexual jealousy and what seems to be Cassidy’s innately psychopathic personality - without really settling on anything convincing. Now, the novel’s eliminativist premises naturally make the question of “motive” problematic, and this goes double in Neil’s case. According to the Argument, “motive” is just another illusion, a rationalisation which obscures the real causes of our actions. Cassidy, meanwhile, has amplified his alreadyexisting psychopathic tendencies by eliminating the illusion of free will. “You know that feeling you have, the feeling of making things happen, of being responsible? That’s just a product, something generated by your brain. It simply accompanies your actions, your decisions. Neil’s shut it down. He hasn’t made a decision or willed anything to happen in fucking years. He experiences decision, just minus the sensation of willing them.” (N 253) Yet removing motive and free will only brings to the fore the question of causality, and instead of asking what Neil’s motives are, we must ask what causes his actions. Ostensibly, Neil’s project is to continue eliminating what phenomenological philosophers call “intentionality” – the “feeling of aboutness” that humans, and to a lesser extent other conscious creatures, possess, but which the inanimate world lacks. As Daniel C. Dennett and John Haugeland neatly summarise, “Some things are about other things: a belief can be about icebergs, but an iceberg is not about anything; an idea can be about the number 7, but the number 7 is not about anything; a book or a film can be about Paris, but Paris is not about anything.”[v] “Before science,” Bible explains, “we largely understood the world in intentional terms. From the dawn of recorded history pretty much all of our explanations of the world were psychological. Then along comes science and bang: where storms were once understood in terms of angry gods and the like, they’re understood in terms of high pressure and cells and so on. Science has pretty much scrubbed psychology from the natural world.” (N 47) Cassidy wants to extend the elimination, so that – at one and the same time – “psychology” is scrubbed from the human, and human beings are fully reinserted into the natural world. But instead of moving beyond intentionality, Cassidy’s relationship to Bible shows all the signs of an obsessive attachment. It matters very intensely to Cassidy what Bible thinks and feels. Rather than being a coolly rational presence, scientific detachment incarnate, Cassidy is a Romantic, Mephistopholean figure, engaged in a contradictory, necessarily self-defeating, quest.[vi] Despite having exposed experience as a myth, he wants to close the gap between experience and knowledge; he wants Bible to live the Argument. Cassidy is what we might call a naive eliminativist – he wants to directly eliminate all the furniture of human phenomenology (will, motive, consciousness) – and get directly to the Real. Bible, by contrast, is more of a Kantian, in that he accepts that there is a basic incompatibility between experience and the Real. In this respect, his position is actually closer to 7

Incognitum Hactenus vol. 2 that of Thomas Metzinger, a philosopher whose arguments may at first sight seem to underwrite Cassidy’s position. The argument that Metzinger presents in Being No-One and The Ego Tunnel is that while, at the level of cognition, it’s possible to debunk selfhood and intentionality, we are incapable of dispensing with these illusions at the level of lived experience – here, we have to operate as if they are true.vii Metzinger in effect subscribes to a version of what Bakker, in “The End of the World As We Knew It: Neuroscience and the Semantic Apocalypse”, calls the “bottleneck thesis” [viii]: we are natural in such a way that it is impossible to fully conceive of ourselves as natural. In other words, we are our brains in such a way that we can only understand ourselves as something other than our brains. Expressed in this way, the thesis is not overtly contradictory. It possesses an ontological component, that we are fundamentally ‘physical’ (whatever this means), and an epistemological component, that we cannot know ourselves as such. The plank in reason breaks when we probe the significance of the claim – step inside it as it were. If we cannot understand ourselves as natural, then we must understand ourselves as something else. ... We can disenchant the world, but not ourselves. Yet this failure of disenchantment means that we (or at least our phenomenal selves) are haunted creatures, constitutively alienated – or rather these phenomenal selves are ghosts, deprived of the substance which they are vainly yet ineluctably condemned continually to posit. Ironically, the very fact that we are capable of understanding the naturalistic bases of all our phemeneological states disembeds us from nature. We cannot simply be-in-theworld in the way animals that with more limited forms of consciousness can. No-one has described this fix more vividly than Thomas Ligotti: No other life forms know they are alive, and neither do they know they will die. This is our curse alone. Without this hex upon our heads, we would never have withdrawn as far as we have from the natural – so far and for such a time that it is a relief to say that we have been trying with our all not to say: We have long since been denizens of the natural world. Everywhere around us are natural habitats, but within us is the shiver of startling and dreadful things. Simply put: We are not from here. [ix] The echo of Heideggerian themes such as being-towards-death here brings us close to the terrain of existentialism, but Ligotti in effect proffers Heideggerian theses stripped of any redemptive promise. Atheistic existentialism was a form of mitigated nihilism, in which a repudiation of theistic transcendence was replaced by an assertion of human transcendence. Like Neuropath, but in the register of horror, rather than science, fiction, Ligotti presents an inverted existentialism, in which human beings are puppets, whose consciousness, far from delivering freedom, only serves to torment them. At this point, it’s worth pausing a while to reflect on Nick Srnicek’s observation that “this period of horror and revulsion at neuroscience’s implications seems to mirror the depression and meaninglessness of the existentialist movement. And just as post-existentialism turned to philosophies of affirmation and play and ultimately turned existentialism’s 8

Incognitum Hactenus vol. 2 absurdity into a positive condition for liberation, so too it seems as though future philosophers might take neuroscience as offering hope and freedom from folk psychology’s constraints.”x A detour into existentialism may prove fruitful here, since many of existentialism’s core doctrines continue to exert (a sometimes surreptitious) influence, and the revulsion from neuroscience – the rejection of Neuropath’s Argument – is in many cases motivated by vestigial existentialist attitudes. We can distinguish conservative and radical strands of the existentialist inheritance, even as we must recognise that they often interweave. To the reactionary, Fredric Jameson points out that Heidegger’s “diagnoses of ‘modernity’”, his call “for a purgation of the decadent habits of bourgeois comfort by way of anxiety and fear of death” was “part and parcel of a whole conservative and anti-modernist ideology embraced by non-leftist intellectuals across the board in the 1920s”.[xi] The other, leftist, strand of the existentialist legacy, meanwhile, was tied up with Sartre’s assertion of absolute human freedom. After being rejected by successive waves of continental thought, Sartrean voluntarism, or some version of it, has been rehabilitated in recent years, via the work of thinkers such as Badiou, Zizek and Peter Hallward. However sophisticated these accounts are, they all ultimately rest on the claim that freedom is attained when mechanical causality is suspended. Freedom is conceived of in terms of a rupture with the mechanical causality that obtains at all times in the natural world, and which reigns in the social world when it calcifies into what Sartre called the practico-inert. The power of the Argument in Neuropath is that it reasserts the claims of determinism against these refurbishments of the doctrine of free will. Yet it’s important not to be too quick here. Determinism is not necessarily automatism. Even if we concede everything to the Argument, this isn’t a warrant for pessimism or for the denial of freedom. The classic “compatiblist” solution to the free will-determinism conundrum – favoured by philosophers such as Spinoza and Hume – is to argue that freedom consists not in the absence of causality, but in a particular kind of causality. An entity can be deemed to be free if can be said to cause its own actions. Now this naturally begs all sorts of questions about how we define an entity, and what it means to say that an entity can cause its own actions, questions that I cannot possibly begin to answer in any depth here. Suffice it say, however, that nothing in Neuropath which undermines this compatibilist account of freedom. It may seem that it does because Neuropath equivocates between consciousness per se and realtime conscious experience. The Argument establishes that real-time conscious experience is not only an illusion, it is necessarily an illusion. But this does not entail that consciousness as such is illusory – for where does the apprehending of the illusion happen if not in some form of consciousness? The very ability to posit the “bottleneck thesis” means that there must be some form of human consciousness which can “fully conceive of [itself] as natural”. Here we are compelled to follow Ray Brassier and make a distinction between the phenomenal self (exploded by the eliminativist claims of the Argument), and the rational subject. Or to put it another way, the subject that is eliminated presupposes 9

Incognitum Hactenus vol. 2 a subject which eliminates. The subject which eliminates is the depersonalized subject of science – the bodiless “Cartesian” subject decried by so much cultural theory over the past thirty years. If the claims of Neuropath’s Argument are to be believed, however, it is in this Cartesian subjectivity, not in the embodied subjectivity beloved of cultural theory, where the possibilities for freedom really reside. Far from being the solitary figure derided by anti-Cartesianism, this subject is the site of collective intelligence: science and enlightenment are, after all, collective processes. Here, we can upend Bakker and Ligotti’s pessimism – by entirely naturalistic means, and without any interruption whatsoever in mechanistic causality, a form of collective intelligence has appeared which is capable of reflexively acting on the conditions which allowed it to emerge. A far more radical freedom than existentialism ever dreamt of becomes possible. There are no “judgements of God”, and, via neuroscience, genetic engineering and other techno-scientific practices, cognition can explore, augment and mutate its own naturalistic bases. Nature becomes a laboratory. Neuroscience is on the cusp between what Bakker calls “practical nihilism” and the theoretical nihilism which Ray Brassier has argued is the correlate of the Enlightenment.[xii] The question of “practical nihilism” in Neuropath reminds us that the world of the novel is not denuded of agency. I don’t mean Neil’s agency, which, as I argued above, remains a throwback, saturated with intentionality. Neil is a nihilist of the traditional sort, who recodes the depersonalizing implications of radical enlightenment into a psychological drama. The agent without intentionality in Neuropath is that of capital itself. Bakker is correct to say that the most important implications of the novel concern capital’s instrumentalization of neuroscience; it is therefore a pity that Neuropath focused so much on the theatrical psychodrama between Neil and Thomas, and so little on Neil’s work as neuroscientist-for-hire. Cassidy’s neurosurgical work illustrates Paolo Virno’s claim that “[n]ihilism, once hidden in the shadow of technical-productive power, becomes a fundamental ingredient of that power, a quality highly prized by the marketplace of labor.”[xiii] But capital’s practical nihilism remains a mitigated nihilism. Even while capital fully exploits the results of neuroscientific research, it is at the same time committed to disseminating the ideological image of the conscious subject capable of exercising choice. It is capital, therefore, that must keep deferring the “semantic apocalypse”. Rather than recoiling from theoretical and practical nihilism, then, one path to postcapitalism would consist in fully embracing it, so that the notion of the self-conscious subject – which, according to Althusser, is the very cornerstone of capitalist ideology - is no longer sustainable. One contribution neuroscience may make is in assisting us to overcome what Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams have called “folk politics”[xiv]: a form of politics which applies the already dubious assumptions of folk psychology to systems and practices whose abstraction and complexity cannot possibly be understood in its terms. In the folk political left, the reactionary and the progressive strands of the existentialist legacy have come to be fused. As Jameson has recently observed, anti-modernist ideology 10

Incognitum Hactenus vol. 2 is by no means now restricted to “non-leftist intellectuals”: “There is a tendency among the Left today -- and I mean all varieties of the Left -- of being reduced to protecting things. It is a kind of conservatism; saving all the things that capitalism destroys which range from nature to communities, cities, culture and so on. The Left is placed in a very self-defeating nostalgic position, just trying to slow down the movement of history.”[xv] The interlacing of melancholic pastoralism and can-do voluntarism has made for a disastrous cocktail, which concedes techno-modernity to capital, while retreating into reminiscences of revolts from the age of quill-pens or retellings of revolutions which happened in feudal conditions. Agency does not entail voluntarism. On the contrary, voluntarism is likely to impede agency by obfuscating the causal factors which prevent entities from acting, or which can enable them to act more effectively. Marxism has always known this – what does the famous claim that men make history but not in conditions of their own making mean if not that agency is not the same as the assertion of will? In truth, leftist voluntarism involved a backsliding from the model of agency which Marx had proposed. This Marxian account of agency strikingly resonates with Catherine Malabou’s account of plasticity, which, as Nick Srnicek pointed out in his discussion of Neuropath, offers rich resources for rethinking agency in the light of neuroscientific discoveries. “‘What we have called the constitutive historicity of the brain is really nothing other than its plasticity,” Malabou claims. “In ordinary speech [plasticity] designates suppleness, a faculty for adaptation, the ability to evolve. ... Talking about the plasticity of the brain thus amounts to thinking of the brain as something modifiable, ‘formable,’ and formative at the same time. ... But it must be remarked that plasticity is also the capacity to annihilate the very form it is able to receive or create.”[xvi] While thinking in terms of plasticity offers all sorts of new conceptual opportunities, we must now return to Bakker’s remarks on “practical nihilism”. For whatever the theoretical implications of neuroscience, Bakker is surely right that its practical applications will in the first instance be controlled by the dominant force on the planet: capital. Capital can use neuroscientific techniques to stave off the semantic apocalypse: ironically, it can control people by convincing them that they are free subjects. This is already happening, via the low-level neurocontrol exerted through media, advertising and all the other platforms through which communicative capitalism operates. Whether neuroscience’s practical nihilism will do more than reinforce capital’s domination will ultimately depend on how far the institutions of techno-science can be liberated from corporate control. Certainly, there are no a priori reasons why Malabou’s question “what should we do with our brain?” should not be answered collectively, by a General Intellect free to experiment on itself. 11

Incognitum Hactenus vol. 2 [i] Paolo Virno, Grammar of the Multitude (Los Angeles: Semiotexte, 2004) [ii] These remarks were made by Bakker in a comment responding to a December 2008 blog post on Neuropath by Steven Shaviro. www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=698 [iii] The paper was presented at the University of Western Ontario’s Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism in November 2008. It is archived in a November 2008 post on the Speculative Heresy blog [http://speculativeheresy.wordpress. com/2008/11/26/the-semantic-apocalypse/]. [iv] Neuropath, (London: Orion, 2008), 186. All subsequent references to Neuropath will be of the form (N page number). [v] Daniel C. Dennett and John Haugeland, “Intentionality” in R. L. Gregory, ed., The Oxford Companion to the Mind, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), reproduced online at http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/intentio.htm. [vi] In “The End of the World As We Knew It: Neuroscience and the Semantic Apocalypse”, Bakker invokes the example of sentient aliens “similar to us in every physiological respect save that evolution was far kinder to them, allowing them to neurophysiologically process their own neurophysiology the way they process environmental inputs, such that for them introspection was a viable mode of scientific investigation. Where we simply see trees in the first instance, they see trees as neurophysiological results in the first instance.” These aliens are bewildered by human beings’ inability to naturalise their own consciousness. Why is Neil not like these more dispassionate creatures? [vii] Nick Srnicek outlines some of the parallels between Kant and Metzinger in “Neuroscience, The Apocalypse, and Speculative Realism”, his response to Bakker’s “The End of the World As We Knew It: Neuroscience and the Semantic Apocalypse”. “Both Kant and Metzinger are asking what conditions are required for experience to be possible. But of course, rather than ultimately finding the source of these conditions within a transcendental subject, Metzinger finds them in the brain. And rather than describing experience as a single formal structure comprised of intuitions and categories, Metzinger offers a much more nuanced view of experience. Despite these advances though, in framing the interpretation of neuroscience this way, Metzinger still seems to place neurology in the clutches of a classic Kantian problem. And Metzinger himself even seems somewhat aware of it, as he will repeatedly argue that phenomenal immediacy is not epistemic immediacy, or as Kant might have put it – the phenomenal is not the noumenal. What appears as immediately and intuitively given has no necessary relation with an independent world.” [http://speculativeheresy.wordpress.com/2008/11/26/the-semantic-apocalypse/] [viii] As Nick Srnicek’s remarks quoted above make clear, Kant in effect subscribes to a non-naturalistic version of the same argument, where it is our constitution as transcendental subjects which renders us incapable of conceiving of ourselves as belonging to nature. [ix] Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against The Human Race (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2010) [x] “Neuroscience, The Apocalypse, and Speculative Realism” [xi] Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic, (London/ New York: Verso, 2009), 426 [xii] “Far from being “a pathological exacerbation of subjectivism”, theoretical nihilism is “the unavoidable corollary of the realist conviction that there is a mind-independent reality, which, despite the assumptions of human narcissism, is indifferent to our existence and oblivious to the ‘values’ and ‘meanings’ which we would drape over it in order to make it more hospitable.” Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, (Houndmills/ New York: Palgrave, 2007), xi The disenchantment of the world is an achievement of reason: enlightenment and nihilism are one. [xiii] Virno, p86 [xiv] Their book Folk Politics is forthcoming on Zer0 books. [xv] Aaron Leonard, “Capitalism, the infernal machine: An interview with Fredric Jameson”, http://rabble.ca/books/reviews/2012/02/capitalism-infernal-machine-interview-frederic-jameson [xvi] Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain? Translated by Sebastian Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 4-5. Independently of Malabou, Alex Williams has argued that plasticity provides an important model for reconceptualising solidarity. “This new form of solidarity,” he argues, “must be capable of fluidity and rapid response, able to exploit weaknesses within systems and structures opportunistically and with a global purview, one which crucially can mirror the rapidity and fluidity of international finance. This is solidarity as plasticity, rather than the static brick-like form of Fordist labour solidarity, capable of flowing and shifting, yes, but also of fixing into position and assuming a hardened form where necessary.” “Negative Solidarity and Post-Fordist Plasticity”, posted at http://splinteringboneashes.blogspot.com/2010/01/negative-solidarity-and-post-fordist. html, January 2010 12