The Neurotic Turn

As far as I know — at least in the twenty-first century — it has been in vogue for less academic journals and books to work on re-definitions of hackneyed or redundant terms (such is “neurosis”¹). Weighty terms such as “Being”, the “Subject”, “Nature”, have always brought with them the spectre or impetus of a neurosis which aims at broadening, re-instantiating, re-claiming and redefining these terms, and we are well aware of those philosophers that have been part of this process. It is in many ways inevitable but also not without corruption, digression and plain ignorance to the genealogical, etymological and philological continuity of words and their “uses”. In this century, we possibly have a “lighter” and more liberal desire to appropriate words/terms (in praise of words but also in a spirit to traverse them through this exercise; to bring about various actions and to participate more instantaneously with the world).

There is also a peculiarly modern urge to usurp theories in the making and produce them prematurely under some slogan, conference or shared polemic² (… with the hope that such prematurity may create a monster of intervention, subversion, immanance, “the real”?). The impulse to make-into-product something that might only work on registers outside of labour and production can be seen as both a middle-finger to the fastidiousness of thinking that has its “proper place”, “proper time”, “proper criteria” and “proper audience” but also — and not without concern — hints at some reconciliation or mutation of the practices of theory with the practices of fashion — conflating different temporal criteria where The Production of the New (O’Sullivan and Zepke 2011) and The Shock of the New (Hughes 1991) become the same thing. The Dublin Unit of Speculative Thought (DUST) have characterized and affirmed their work as existing within a polemical space of conflicts, negotiations, inclusion and exclusion, as a place where work MUST be done in order for us to “weoponize” ourselves from the prevailing dogmas, despotic forces and downright facism overwhelming the orthodox academic institution. In this sense, “time and place” are not just the criteria for the coherence of a piece of academic work in relation to its tradition, but also act as the spontaneous and revolutionary conditions for an “event”, disclosing the power of intellectual intervention (as well as showcasing fashion’s effects and humour’s function, i.e. timing).

I for one definitely discern some friction between a Deleuzian affirmation of “styles of thought”, “nomenclatures”, a “pragmatics of language” that aspires to reconcile itself with the speed, immanence and potentiality of existence, and, on the other hand, a desire for “correct” context, “correct” intention and “correct” use of words. Both have different attitudes similar to different personalities (different neuroses).

Written as an apologia or as a tautological statement about neurosis itself, could we not say that all the inclinations that drive the values and presentational methods of knowledge above are driven by neuroses? This is not without a Nietzschean undertone — that there is essentially no true or absolute knowledge but rather the making-true of the neurotic (whether personal or collective). Would a book on neurosis save us from hypocrisy and allow us to reflect upon our own prejudices, not only to reflect but to “speculate” that these neuroses are the cause or operation of human consciousness itself?

Regardless of these abstract questions I give you, we do see (or certain people have discerned) neuroses as a category, symptom, characteristic, process and metaphor disclosed in contemporary existence. Firstly, it has to be understood that it is a natural consequence of neurosis itself to hunt out phenomena and return such to “itself”; to take over the subject and work itself into the forefront of the subject’s mind (such can be attested to in the traditional traumatized subject). This power is not merely behavioural or practical (empirical case-studies of neurotics) but also theoretical. Neurosis does not become vanquished once rationalized. Rationalization is openly neurotic and has been hidden under more “acceptable” terminology for centuries; whether in the continual spouting of Socrates, the “meditations” of Descartes, “the last instance” (Laruelle), in the “counting as one” (Badiou 2011), under the “id” (Freud), under the “I that accompanies all experience” (Kant) or the “family resemblance” that links words or concepts (Wittgenstein) and perceptions (empiricism). Irrational, auto-generated repetition, focus, proliferation and distribution of information in the human mind (neurosis) has been co-opted in the above thinkers as a necessary, cognitive and rational process (and this would be fine if they openly accepted such as fundamentally neurotic in character and source!) but alas we are still too moral it seems to accept this fact, and so we continue to repress the intellect’s neurotic capacity (which is an early sign of neurosis/maladjustment itself). The entirety of the phenomenological tradition secretly lays claim to this neurosis; that within the manifestation of any appearance, the desire to appear, or the correlate of human consciousness which desires to turn things into sense, cannot be separated from the appearance itself. This neurosis is called intentionality in phenomenology; the awareness that we are always conscious of something (whether directed mentally towards some thing or other, or, whether seduced by something already outside of us). Perhaps the juncture where psychology meets phenomenology is at this moment of terrifying comprehension where we realize that the neurotic dimension of phenomenological intentionality might not be what we wish to be exposed to — “I never asked to see such and such in this way!” Or perhaps it is as simple as realising that the explicit intentionality involved in sense-making and form-making (knowledge) is not always commensurate with our other neuroses.

To describe things in the empirical world (humans, non-humans, objects, processes, etc.) as neurotic, let alone as conditions for experience, apprehension and comprehension itself (see my essays³), is quite a new phenomenon altogether. What was once used to describe or diagnose the identity of certain human states in consciousness is now used to point to things outside of this “disfunctionality” in the human psyche⁴. The result is — however — not due to some imaginative human analogy or anthropomorphization, but due to the acceptance that the neurosis that humans were experiencing came from a power that preceded human cognition and outstretched it. Even the lightest research into animal psychology suggests both a neurosis preceding human cognition and independent from it⁵.

In traditional anthropocentric psychology there are “conditions”, “origins” and “affects” to neurosis (the chaos of affairs vital to him/her, the conditions that have acted immediately or gradually on him/her) but that they do not have gravity “outside” of this locus of disturbance should be of great philosophical import/significance (let alone that such neuroses can occur without influence on another person). If the effects (and not simply “cause”) cannot be discerned in the social or natural sciences then what leads us to conclude that such neuroses came from there in the first place? This is not to say that neurosis cannot arise outside of the human mind (quite the contrary) but that — whether in an object, organism or environmental condition — such neuroses cannot be reducible to a sphere of causal events analyzable by the physical sciences or social positivism. The difference that Gilles Deleuze discerns between a process of nature (working on an A–B scale) and a process of production (working on an A–Z) scale (Deleuze and Guattari 2004) is true of neurosis; its spontaneous proliferation of psychic association’s and the “lines of flight”⁶ that esoteric signification ensues. Equally, that the subjects, objects and dynamics of neurosis are always already “charged” with characteristics (or a mode of being-in-the-world) evades any objective and neutral study of objects; their causes and their effects are always implicated, never neutral (and hence could not be objectively repeated or hypothesized). The effectuation of an entity can appear more powerful than its putative cause (whether by determining transformation in the relation, the change between two states, or in an effect that changes its context/condition) and hence denies the plausibility of an absolute, uniform or mechanistic ground which determines its objects. However, it will be a long time until we may point at waves crashing into one another, climate cycles, diffusions of prophecy, fear and paranoia proliferated by the media, and state that they are operating on a neurotic basis and not merely a traditionally causal or mechanistic basis. Equally it is not just the question of where neurosis emerges in the field of human activity but why? Ivan Petrovitch Pavlov asks — “How and why do there arise changes in the normal processes of the nervous system? Are not these real prerequisites? And where are they all satisfied”? (Pavlov 1941).

Could we make an obscure relation between Kant’s transcendental philosophy and neurosis, explaining that neurosis is a dynamic process that guarantees the bringing-together of experience yet is not ontically found in experience? This characterizes “neurosis” as an active (almost vital) power fundamental to the structure of consciousness and — if we wish to make such a metaphysical leap and equate thinking with being — also the structure of Being. However, characterizations of “neurosis” have also been instantiated on the passive side of cognition as well as the active side. There is a very loose legacy of thinkers that have — for lack of a better word — a more “materialist” view on neurosis which forefronts consciousness as “victim” to the outwardly neurotic affectivity of material life upon the nervous system and the human organism as a whole. Boris Sidis has written many journals on the psychopathology of neurosis, showing that what primarily starts as a science of anatomy and general natural selection⁷ paves the way for a psychological exercise, showing how “immediate emotional impulse” (Richardson 2003: 123) rules the “principle of serviceable, associated habits in the world”:

The manner in which the secretions of the alimentary canal and of certain glands as the liver, kidneys, or mammae are affected by strong emotions, is an excellent instance of the direct action of the sensorium on these organs […] even the slightest excitement of sensory nerve reacts through the pneumogastric nerve on the heart […] directly acted on by the sensorium. (Darwin 1872)

The constant sensitivity to external stimuli and the attention to the organism’s “psychic” (as opposed to merely “chemical”) assimilation gives us a picture of an organism open like a wound or popped blister to the world, where the human “sensorium” is controlled through various semiotic and semantic synapses, where the repetitions of external stimuli create a reflex more akin to trauma than to adaptation, neutralization, mastering or comprehension of an environment. That these reflexes are “learnt” qua psychic cues shows us how pertinent psychology is to the study of human functioning, perception, “reality”, epistemology and ontology (these psychic cues preceding “folk psychological” evaluations such as the role of language and the ostensible difference between intentional and non-intentional actions).

An intimate relation exists between the functions of the central nervous system on the one hand and the sensory, motor, glandular, and visceral functions on the other. This vital relation, though unobtrusive to the casual observer, stands out clear and distinct in the domain of certain nervous and mental disturbances, such as hysteria, hystereoepilepsy, larval epilepsy, neurastenia, psychasthenia. All such conditions are mental disturbances, conscious or subconscious, and are termed by me psychopathies or recurrent mental states. Recurrence of the symptom complex is pathognomonic of psychopathies, or briefly, neurosis. (Sidis 1914)

The onslaught of external stimuli is given further purchase by Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of “shock” (respectfully influenced by Sigmund Freud) — “for a living organism, protection against stimuli is an almost more important function than the reception of stimuli” (Freud 1922). So far we have used animal psychology to point to the perpetual/neurotic interplay between external environment, physical organs and the various psychic triggers that effect, monitor and orient our everyday lives, but here consciousness becomes the very thing that protects us from — as well as configures — reality, a reality full of external, impersonal “energies”. For Benjamin reading Freud, “the threat of these energies is one of shocks” and “the more readily consciousness registers these shocks, the less likely they are to have a traumatic effect” (Benjamin 1999). What interests me here is that consciousness-as-neurosis now has some putative impetus; consciousness now has to act perpetually (neurotically) in order to buffer/rationalize, neutralize and acclimatize itself to the trauma of the external world. This has obvious connections to traditional psychoanalytic theory whereby “neurosis” acts as a way to repeat traumatic events in order to somehow change the unchangeable event, to reconcile the irreconcilable, or more precisely —

…to repeat the moment of trauma so that one’s psyche can muster the anxiety required to achieve a successful cathexis or binding of the excess of the excitation concomitant with the traumatic breaching of the organism’s psychic defenses. Thus, the compulsion to repeat consists in an attempt on the part of the unconscious to relive the traumatic incident in a condition of anxious anticipation that goes some way to buffering the traumatic shock⁸.

Philosopher Ray Brassier allows us to make a leap from an immanent neurosis, which acts as a novel theory in physiology, to a transcendental neurosis acting both speculatively and retrospectively; retrospectively as thought’s obsession with its own non-existent (or nonconceptual) origin (or non-origin), and speculatively as thought’s overcoming of its own illusory “horizon” and very “real” gradual extinction. For Ray Brassier the overwhelming fact that our “terrestrial horizon will be wiped away in roughly 4.5 billion years from now” (Lyotard quoted in Brassier 2007: 223), when the sun is fully extinguished, holds traumatic potency in that it does away with any infinite horizon of thought that thinking ostensibly follows (“God”, “Nature”/“Vitalism”). Similar to psychological trauma — how is thought registering the “shock” or impending cancellation of its own thinking? Has this catastrophe already happened — the repetition of this event driving a horizonless thought? Brassier goes on to say that such a catastrophe is “transcendental” because it cannot be registered on the empirical level. In my own illinformed way I interpret this fourfold: as the inability for experience to register this extinction through any vehicle of appearance; that such a catastrophe does away with the possibility of experience and not simply the elimination of various content in experience; that it transcends the correlation of being and thought (which are commonly held as being inextricably intertwined) as the disappearance of thought will never be thought; but also that such a catastrophe inhibits thought with a challenge beyond that of maintaining human life, posed in the question “how could thought advance — through biological or technological innovation — to a point where it can think the death of human life (and other forms of life) without being encumbered by the limitations of that organism? Jean-François Lyotard provocatively states:

With the disappearance of earth, thought will have stopped — leaving that disappearance absolutely unthought of. (Lyotard 1991: 10)

Leaving aside other fruitful ideas Brassier’s catastrophe raises (absolute physical extinction as the gradual objectification of thought/the externalization of the internal, and the possibility for thought to characterize itself relatively independent from the horizons that have driven it hitherto) let us hover over this characterization of thought as something that is driven but has already unbound itself from any future horizon, a thought — like Freud’s and later Benjamin’s — that perpetually repeats itself in order to buffer the very real (and metaphysical) trauma of its own vertigo or misplacement between some ambiguous evolutionary impetus and the blind, random vagaries that ensue. It is not only us humans but also every atom, particle, molecule, organism, object, etc. that exists within this framework of extrapolation and misguided inference. If there is no teleology or absolute horizon, then does the world assimilate one anyway through the desire for continuity, uniformity, self-sustainability, the desire for reality itself? Wile E. Coyote walks off the edge of a cliff without noticing. For many moments after, he is still carried by the certainty/ convention/custom of this action. It is only when he looks down to see the air beneath him (it is only when the invisible “equipment” he has hitherto relied on appears now as a problem to be cognitively grasped) that the laws that such comprehension perceives ensues. For entities or processes that cannot reflect on their “being” (that cannot make the switch between “ready-to-hand” and “present-to-hand” existence) we could begin to see a humourous world of “things” trapped inside the “external” uses/determinations of it as X, whether blindly operating (like when an electronically powered walking toy meets an obstacle yet attempts to keep on walking) or like the majority of objects that remain stubbornly inert until triggered/intervened with. Equally, if one allows an effect to sometimes be greater than its cause (thereby giving it some sense of agency), we could also say that it is the objects themselves that maintain a standard (or ecstatic) operation regardless of their position in a network of use, value, signification; the clock remains ticking when we have finished reading its clock face, the basketball remains bouncing when we have tossed it aside in a fit of boredom, even the brain maintains a minimal level of equilibrium and function regardless of any state of diversion, intention and difference that it encounters. In these cases, I am interested by those air-walking moments of Wile E. Coyote, where human activity (and the objects we neurotically allocate) seem to be oriented by nothing but the slipstream of a previous task which is determining them, a pseudo-intrinsic identity, or a custom for custom’s sake. Thanks to Graham Harman, we also have a cogent gateway into what else such objects might be doing other than being caricatures of human intention, and I wonder — if human interaction (theoretical and practical) never completely exhausts an object (humans being objects too) — what procedure allows all available nuances of interaction to be subsumed under one perspective? Could this process aptly be called “neurotic”? Even simply in the generic sense of the neurotic procedure which subsumes all myriad thinking under one master-signifier or traumatic experience, or perhaps in the sense that the content and impact of thoughts for the neurotic are in some ways determined by the attitude of the neurotic himself, his disposition, his own experiences, and in this sense, could an object’s relation to another object be retrieved in the object itself?

Another perhaps more controversial aspect of neurosis is its affinity with “Love”. We might not go as far as Freud and state that the unsuccessful resolution of castration anxiety (boys) and penis envy (girls) leads to a form of neurosis, but there is — especially in Lacan, and his interpretation of Freud’s “rat man” scenario — the unsuccessful resolution of two requirements in life. Firstly, the subject has to claim a place for himself in the sexual realm, accede to what Lacan calls the “virile function”, and mirror this status in the realm of work, his professional life. Secondly, he has to achieve an enjoyment one might characterize as tranquil and univocal of the sexual object, once it is chosen, granted to the subject’s life. However, two problems occur when he attempts this: in relation to the first requirement the obsessional generates a narcissistic relation with a character to whom he basically ceded control of his life, a character to whom “he delegates the responsibility of representing him in the world and of living in himself” (Lacan 1953). In relation to the second aim, achieving this “tranquil and univocal” enjoyment comes at the price of a splitting of the sexual partner. Lacan refers to this splitting as involving an “aura of abrogation” — a kind of cancellation, annulation of the object — which then leads to the appearance of another object.

Love seems to be the most obvious battleground for neurosis. Our need for social interaction, the impact the human face has on registering emotion, all mixed with that great social imaginary backdrop of “Love” depicted through Ancient Greek tragedy to contemporary romantic film (let alone the differing pledges of love that Socrates, Spinoza, Shakespeare, Keats, etc. spoke of). We can speak of it (especially in Shakespeare, I believe) as the varying manifestations of myriad obsessions/ neuroses. In the “intellectual” world “Love” was seen as non-dialectical; Spinoza stated that:

No sorrow can exist with the accompanying idea of God, or, Love to God cannot be turned into hatred. But some may object, that if we understand God to be the cause of all things, we do for that very reason consider Him to be the cause of sorrow. But I reply, that in so far as we understand the causes of sorrow, it ceases to be a passion, that is to say, it ceases to be sorrow; and therefore in so far as we understand God to be the cause of sorrow do we rejoice. (Spinoza 1996)

Have you ever said Yes to a single joy? O my friends, then you have said Yes too to all woe. All things are entangled, ensnared, enamored; if ever you wanted one thing twice, if ever you said, “You please me, happiness! Abide moment!” then you wanted all back. All anew, all eternally, all entangled, ensnared, enamored--oh then you loved the world. Eternal ones, love it eternally and evermore; and to woe too, you say: go, but return! For all joy wants--eternity. (Nietzsche 1974)

Even in Socrates, “Love” is a road to forms of knowledge and does not impede it: “Eros is a desire whose highest expression is the desire for wisdom” (Belfiore 2012).

However, there is cause to argue for a “Love” that manifests as more aptly a psychological conflict (internal and external), between resolving “ideal” modes of beingin-love, with a “lack” (Lacan), alienation (Hegel/Marx), or problem associating with a fundamentally dissociated world (Jung). The obsession of jealousy, lust, ownership, the appropriation of non-appropriated forms, discloses itself as a master-relation (or convention) in “Love”. However, it is a neurosis not unlike or disassociated from every other neurosis in the world (the need to turn various lights off or check the washing machine, etc.). In fact it would be more apt to say that “Love” is a human master-relation of neurosis.

In the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy and literature there are at least two thinkers who represent this “neurosis” and involve it so much in their work that it could almost be seen as a case against the paradigm of “disinterestedness” that became the precursor for any real model of knowledge. Those thinkers — for different reasons — are Franz Kafka and Søren Kierkegaard.

Franz Kafka’s neurosis with Felice Bauer, documented mainly through letters which became posthumously entitled Letters to Felice (1973), shows the extent to which Kafka thought about his “lover”. Between the years 1912-1917 Kafka wrote a minimum of two letters to Felice every day and at times intermittently during the actual creation of such works as The Trial and The Metamorphosis, discussing the progress of these books with her. In Kafka’s work there remains a truth specific to neurosis; there is, simultaneously, an extrapolation of the universality of love “out-there” and in his characters, yet also a complete solipsism of love where every conceptual and physical act leads him back to Felice. At times, he also claims to live vicariously through her; he claims to feel ill when he discovers that she is unwell, he constantly asks her — when she is healthy — whether she is in fact ill, because Kafka (the hypochondriac) is always suggesting himself ill.

In Kafka there is a both a “being-towards-neurosis” (as if there were a Heidegerrean mode of neurotic-being entering the human world, as theorists such as Fromm and Marcuse adhere to qua the epoch of advanced production/capitalism) and also a “neurosis-towardsbeing” (a constant/neurotic sensitivity towards — and amalgamating in — the self).

Søren Kierkegaard’s neurosis with Regine Olsen was of a similar self-tormenting disposition. As Charles Baxter has mentioned:

Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher, fell in love with an attractive girl, Regine Olsen, and then he had concluded that they would be incompatible, that the love was mistaken, that he himself was so complex and she was simple, and he contrived to break the engagement so as to give the appearance that it was the young lady’s fault, not his.

He succeeded in breaking the engagement, in never marrying her. Cowardice was probably involved here. Kierkegaard wished to believe that the fault lay with the nature of love itself, the problem of love, its fate in his life. From the personal he extrapolated to the general. A philosopher’s trick. Regine married another man and moved away from Copenhagen to the West Indies, but Kierkegaard, the knight of faith, carried a burning torch for her, in the form of his philosophy, the rest of his days. This is madness of a complex lifelong variety. He spent his career writing philosophy that would, among other things, justify his actions toward Regine Olsen. He died of a warped spine. (Baxter 2001)

From single-celled amoeba’s to multi-cellular organisms, what part of the process of “extending” and “attracting” in relation to one’s environment has essentially changed? We have moved from something which is limited in its action/function (that is deemed a “determinate reflex” — the amoeba) to a level of ostensible sophistication/culture which could still be seen to be built upon this principle of extensions and attractions in relation to something analogous to Freud’s “pleasure principle” (the instinct of both seeking pleasure and avoiding pain in order to satisfy biological and psychological needs). In the twenty-first century these extensions and attractions have proliferated and appropriated every aspect of lived experience; “I am cold, I will put a jumper on”, “I’m walking this way so as to avoid the road”, “I am using a language to communicate/ liberate my thoughts”, “I am walking to the café because I am hungry”, “I scratch my head because I have an itch”, “The jumper I am putting on is from my favourite shop”, “It’s my favourite colour”, etc. We are happy to allocate a principle of determinism to the hard sciences; we enjoy learning about what plants, chemicals, our bodies do, without us telling them to do so, without us constantly monitoring, deciding for, or being conscious of such processes, but in the humanities and softer sciences we are of a completely different opinion. The determination of various thoughts/reflexes and principles of pleasure/ pain in the domain of everyday life (which includes all disciplines — philosophy, politics, ethics, etc.) is, however, of a similar principle of determinism, yet the “ground” which sets the criteria for such determinism (the ostensible “cause”) has a semiotic and semantic nature to it which cannot be completely “naturalized” (at least not with our present definitions of “naturalism”⁹). Cultural constructions/conventions produce habits of a second and perhaps third nature, whereby the stimulus for such habits (conceptual habits as well as physical) do not pertain in “matter” or in any logical, rational, evolutionary or positivistic manner. To be embarrassed about being by oneself in a café, muttering the latest pop song playing on the radio (but singing quiet enough so no one can hear), reaching for your mobile phone — what fundamental or ontological principle can we equate this to? Because culture changes, can be manipulated, superimposed, and so forth, and because there is not one locus where this change occurs, a purely essentialist, biological (of innate genes, etc.), physical or logical framework cannot be established. Assimilation is what occurs. Although biological/physiological factors of the pleasure principle obviously come into play with how we respond to our environment, “pleasure” and “pain” are never solely found in responses to the physical environment alone. A boy has been invited to his first rock concert, yet a few hours before the concert should start it has been canceled due to health and safety reasons. Do we not find a principle of pleasure and pain here? A form of pleasure and pain constructed culturally, without legitimation by — and recourse to — a biological or philosophically necessary condition one wishes to allocate as defining the human species.

These newer, constructed arenas of pleasure and pain necessarily take the psychic subject as de facto, and forms of capture, acting, roleplaying, determination (i.e assimilation), occur. Yet we still hold a general consensus that the act of thinking comes from within us causa sui and intervenes with “the balance of nature” (theory of homeostasis¹⁰); that thinking constitutes “a role of the dice” (Mallarme), “the creation of new concepts” (Deleuze), a commitment to a singularity/“Event” (Badiou). Even us “Nietzscheans” cannot deny that thinking (or the task to think for oneself) constitutes the individual/authentic self.

Not only do we see neurosis as the mechanism which attracts and repels us to both our own and our collective world of pleasure and pain (from the sudden reflex of being burnt to our personal and collective ideological inclinations), it is also of the utmost importance that neurosis itself appears as the only anomaly to the pleasure principle — as Freud realized — posed in the question: why is it that we wish to repeat unpleasurable experiences? Neurosis escapes the dialectic of pleasure/ pain because it is neurosis itself that can designate what is of pleasure/pain, significance/insignificance to its subject. It not only designates but transgresses these poles in the name of neurosis. Examples of this can be found in sado-masochism, obsession, “anoraks”, products of thinking “beyond good and evil” — powers of neurosis that cannot see the vague moral, biological, religious and social limitations and demarcations of pleasure/ pain (its inclusion/exclusion and its judging to be “right” or “wrong”). This relatively autonomous neurotic power is in fact the secret fuel that gives breadth to an epic scale of myriad pleasures and desires — assimilations (in capitalism and outside of it in different civilizations).

Technocratic determinism is our closest ally to the theory of neurosis and an enemy to the theory of the subjectification of thought aligned to the human and his/her act of willing. The theory of technocratic determinism — in brief — is the belief that technology acts autonomously from human existence and “progresses” (or changes) in a certain, inevitable way based on earlier technological advances and events. However, as soon as we see technology in a more expansive way (such as the Greek term Techne which involved many forms of crafting/doing), we begin to observe all objects, ideas and environmental conditions as never simply neutral but always already working in some way, always prefigured and always inextricable from the concept we adequately or inadequately assign to it. The objects around us contain the ideas assigned to them as if material signatures of a task, and likewise, if we denied ourselves the possibility to assign ideas into matter and experience (which would itself be impossible) the ideas themselves would disappear, never again to be thought unless resuscitated through material and craft — Techne.

Determination, characterized in the above definition, should not be seen as some teleological determination set by one cause or process that will unwaveringly move in that same direction regardless of posterior or ulterior changes, but rather that concepts, phenomena and entities will determine themselves until something in that relation will become the main determination. This is why we cannot say that the subject causes thoughts because the conditions that motivate a subject — political, financial, social, cultural (and just as importantly the conditions that assimilate a subject’s personality, such as their desire, judgment, methods of valuation, prejudices, experiences, etc.) — all act as determining factors for the character of a thought. This character of thought can never solely come from a “sovereign” subject. Equally, ideas themselves have a long history that embodies, influences and contributes to new thoughts expressed by men (this I get from Hegel).

That ideas are not spontaneous, innate or essentialist, yet assimilate each other as they move along relentlessly, presupposing themselves and commonly subordinating themselves for larger ideas/assimilation, is not as controversial as one may first discern. One of the things that Kant and Hume shared was the insistence that some propositions are “discoverable by the mere operation of thought, without dependence on what is anywhere existent in the universe” (Hume 1993). That thought operates whether we like it or not — regardless of instantiating it as an act of subjectivity (Descartes) or appearing as a “form” emanating from a more perfect realm (Plato) — is a horror disclosed within the advent of philosophy itself. That the operation of thought might perhaps be constructing its own content and not acting as a gateway to apprehend “reality” or “truth” is neurotic. Unfortunately, Husserl’s phenomenological method does not relieve us of this neurosis; at first glance we appear liberated from our solipsistic cogito (the affirmative truth of our existence guaranteed by thought yet skeptical of anything outside this truth), but now we have a thought always already relating and interacting in and to the world; a consciousness directed towards objects, a consciousness always conscious of and not simply selfconscious, a consciousness with intentionality. However, with reluctance to return to our pre-phenomenological methods, we still have to ask with confidence whether we really do think intentionally all the time, and if so, how encumbered, claustrophobic, obnoxious and neurotic such consciousness is! The irony of the development of philosophy is that it attempts to liberate itself from those dichotomies found in figures such as Plato (Reality/Appearance), Descartes (Thinking/ Extended Substance) and Kant (Phenomena/Noumena) which create psychological effects, whilst at the same time accidentally paving the way for a general theory of determinism; whether it be the constant intentionality of the mind on its object, the proliferation of noesis in relation to the nouema, or the cultural relativism that denounces the “absolute” and designates the human condition and its stages of thought as determined by historical, social, technological and political epochs (whether it be the “projects” that define us as human “Dasein” in-the-world, the invisible “equipment” that we are embroiled within when undertaking any nonreflective tasks, or whether it be the “language games” that we “blindly obey” (Wittgenstein 2007: 219)). Like Fichte’s critique of Kant’s Copernican Turn, these forms of constituting and embedding consciousness and its objects within the world also create a form of claustrophobia (this term aptly related to neurosis/ anxiety disorder) where all speculation or fideism seems closed off. In Francis Wolff’s words:

Everything is inside because in order to think anything whatsoever, it is necessary to ‘be able to be conscious of it’, it is necessary to say it, and so we are locked up in language or in consciousness without being able to get out. In this sense, they have no outside. But in another sense, they are entirely turned towards the outside; they are the world’s window: for to be conscious is always to be conscious of something, to speak is necessarily to speak about something. To be conscious of the tree is to be conscious of the tree itself, and not the idea of the tree; to speak about the tree is not just to utter a word but to speak about the thing. Consequently, consciousness and language enclose the world within themselves only insofar as, conversely, they are entirely contained by it. We are in consciousness or language as in a transparent cage. Everything is outside, yet it is impossible to get out. (Wolff 1997)

If I may be so bold, it is only with Hegel that one learns to love this neurosis. Not a neurosis trapped and pressured in the human mind, nor a mind vulnerably open to a reality that thought keeps “intentionally”/ neurotically leaping towards, but rather a neurosis informing our very own awareness of ideas, watching them take shape concretely and never without our involvement (yet sometimes without our “intention”), chasing and self-determining their elaborate and vast constructions that orient human activity. For Hegel, we have a reality mediated by concepts (in the same vein as Kant). Such a reality and its objects are not simply apprehended but are formed through conceptual instances of determination — comprehension. Also, it is not an immutable comprehension of transparent knowing in the mind, nor one determined by some noncognitive “objective” qualities of the object (empiricism), but an instance purportedly finite (the historical and social inter-dependent forms of thought construction) and infinite (the speeds and heights of such conceptual determinations which exceed and assimilate finite spatio-temporal reality). In other words, the instance of comprehension is a movement irreducible to solely the mental concept we give something and/or the way our reality naturally shows itself to us as a product of its own dialectical “development” (or assimilation). It is the mutual implication of the two that gives us a reality in this last consummated instance (and — anyway — we cannot give something a mental concept unless it has been given to us simultaneously). It is the dialectic which connects the shapes of consciousness earlier on in the Phenomenology of Spirit with the configurations of human social life that appear later. It is the relation between the conceptual content of water (that it turns to ice at 0°C and turns to steam at 100°C) and our practical expression of this knowledge. It is the assimilation of further concepts that have informed, appropriated, extricated, oriented (and at times excluded) this conceptual content expressed in human experience. It is not simply that X “is”, but also what the activity expressing the concept X is, and how does this further or disseminate the concept?

Neurosis seems obvious in this regard; the history of concepts that assimilate and proliferate neurotically (sometimes with little coherence), the act of instantiating a knowledge that we are always already within, the less mechanistic and more exotic neuroses of objects, their relations and their interactions, the neurotic whirlpool of a constructed “self” pulling things into perception, situating and defining itself within a domain of pleasure and pain (reaching from physical to philosophical).

So far, we have revealed that the surface phenomena of psychological neurosis can be applied to all areas of being (ontology) which gives it great philosophical importance. Now let us use this ambitious concept of neurosis and see if it can stand up to those abstract philosophical/metaphysical concepts that orient our current trends of philosophical thought. Not only will we find alternatives to such flawed systems of thought (free-will/determinism, teleology/mechanism, internal/ external, subject/object, concept/object and more…), we might find that such systems are equally neurotic, or contain neurosis already within them.

Works Cited

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Baxter, Charles. (2001). Feast of Love. London: Vintage.

Belfiore, Elizabeth. (2012). Socrates’ Daimonic Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Benjamin, Walter. (1999). The Arcades Project. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Brassier, Ray. (2007). Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extincton. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Darwin, Charles, ([1872]2009). The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. London: Penguin.

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. (2004). Capitalism and Schizophrenia: A Thousand Plateaus, trans. B. Massumi. London: Continuum.

Freud, Sigmund. ([1924]2001). “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, in Strachey, J. (ed. and trans.) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. XIX, London, Vintage.

Hughes, Robert. (1991). The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change. London: Thames and Hudson.

Hume, David. ([1772]1993). An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. London: Hackett Publishing Co.

Kafka, Franz. (1973). Letters to Felice. London: Vintage.

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Lyotard, Jean- François. (1991). The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. London and New York: Polity Press.

Nietzsche, Freidrich. (1973). Thus Spoke Zarathustra. London: Penguin.

O’Sullivan, Simon and Zepke, Stephen. (2011). Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New. London: Bloomsbury.

Pavlov, Ivan Petrovitch. (1941). Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes, Volume II: Conditioned Reflexes and Psychiatry, translated and edited by W. Horsley Gantt. London: Lawrence & Wishart Ltd.

Richardson, Angelique. (2003). After Darwin: Animals, Emotions and the Mind. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

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Wolff, Francis. (1997). Dire le monde. Paris: PUF.

Notes

1 The term neurosis has been dismissed by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as a valid term for thirty-five years now.

2 The collation of such varied thinkers as Marx, Lyotard, Deleuze, Land and Brassier under the term “accelerationism” holds true to this desire running through our time. See The Accelerationist Reader, 2014.

3 Johns, Charles, Neurosis and Assimilation, Springer, 2016.

4 In no way does this extension of neurosis have to be seen as conventionally “materialist”. In fact, it has its roots in the most “idealist” of philosophers (Berkeley, Kant, Hegel).

5 See Ivan Petrovitch Pavlov’s lectures concerning human and animal neuroses. Conditioned Reflexes and Psychiatry, Vol 1 and 2.

6 Lines of flight are bolts of pent-up energy that break through the cracks in a system of control and shoot off on the diagonal. By the light of their passage, they reveal the open spaces beyond the limits of what exists. Tim Raynor, Lines of Flight: Deleuze and Nomadic Creativity, 2013.

7 Sidis using Charles Darwin and Claude Bernard in particular.

8 https://thetragiccommunity.wordpress.com/2015/05/27/transcendental-clones-generichumanity-ray-brassier-nina-power-and-returning-tothe-question-of-the-human/

9 For example, Paul Kurtz seems to equate naturalism with a form of materialism. See Paul Kurtz, “Darwin Re-Crucified: Why Are So Many Afraid of Naturalism?” Free Inquiry (Spring 1998).

10 A theory that proposes that ecological systems are usually in stable equilibrium, which is to say that a small change in some particular parameter (the size of a particular population, for example) will be corrected by some “negative feedback” that will bring the parameter back to its original “point of balance” with the rest of the system.