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Introduction
This article is intended to work on a number of different levels. First it is
concerned with the brain-become-subject as hypothesized by Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari in their book What is Philosophy? It is concerned with demonstrating the convergence between Deleuze and Guattaris work and the claims of
some contemporary neurobiological theories of consciousness. In particular I will
be comparing Deleuze and Guattaris hypothesis to the work of Gerald Edelman
and Daniel Dennett. Second it is my contention that the shared themes of this
convergence amount to the renewal of a paradigm in the understanding of human
consciousness and its relationship to the body, which I have elsewhere called the
new Bergsonism (Watson, 1998). The emphasis in the text on themes such as
duration, material connectedness and immanence, Becoming, multiplicity, selection and so on, is taken to be self-evidently Bergsonian. The primary task of this
particular article is, then, to establish a careful technical demonstration of the
existence of a shared set of themes and concepts. But my wider agenda is that it
should contribute towards a more general attempt to establish a neo-Bergsonian
paradigm at the heart of a new sociology of affect.
This is because, so far, sociology has been weak in its attempts to integrate the
body and its forces into its analysis of social and cultural structure. Even where
the body has appeared in sociological analysis it has done so only as a blank slate,
subject to cultural coding. The post-structuralism of the 1970s and 1980s was
an attempt to remedy this denial of organic forces by re-introducing Nietzsche
into philosophy and the social sciences. But the Anglo-American assimilation of
Body & Society 1998 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi),
Vol. 4(4): 2345
[1357034X(199812)4:4;2345;007009]
post-structuralism simply removed those forces yet again (turning it into a kind
of sophisticated social constructionism). In any case post-structuralist theorists,
such as Deleuze and Guattari or Michel Foucault, developed the forces of the
body only as a very abstract theme. No specifics were ever given, for fear of
engaging with the biologists of course. Consequently, when sociologists have
wanted to speak about affect as a determining variable in social life in the past few
decades they have found either that they had to resort to some brand of psychoanalytic vocabulary, or that they simply had no vocabulary at all. Psychoanalytic
theory has its uses but it also has severe limitations. One of those limitations is
that it allows one to talk endlessly about affect without ever getting around to
talking about the body the place where affect and consciousness actually
happen. Sociologists have to learn to talk about the body itself. To do this they
will have to know something about the body. They will have to know something
about how consciousness is actually produced in the body, they will need to know
what affect is as a physiological force, they will need to understand the relationship between affect and consciousness, they will need to know what kind of a
physiological/neurological phenomenon language is. In short they will need to
understand, at a general level, how culture comes to inhabit a biological organism.
The sciences of the brain, nervous system and the rest of the body are progressing apace and will continue to do so with, or without, the blessing of sociologists.
Evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence; these are the sciences that are beginning to provide the lingua franca within
which the popular consciousness develops its appreciation of the human
condition. Sociology must defend its claim to this territory but not by, again,
trying to deny the existence of the body and its forces. The social constructionist
thesis is wrong, there is an outside to culture. Sociology can only retake this
terrain by embracing the new languages of the body and its forces and making
them its own. This is why sociology must become thoroughly Bergsonian it
must reinvent itself as the science of the production of culture in a wider inhuman,
material plain of immanence. Our new conceptual tools will come from theories
of the brain and nervous system, mutation and selection, dissipative structures,
structural modulation, organic autopoiesis, complexity, artificial intelligence and
so on.
Apart from the fact that a sociology that does not take biology on board is no
longer intellectually defensible, there are perhaps more pressing reasons for this
reappraisal of its role. The possible social and political consequences of vast technical expertise in the natural sciences, providing the ability to manipulate and
control at the molecular level, are worrying to say the least. If social scientists do
not grasp this nettle then they are destined to become ever further sidelined; they
instead in terms of the direct encounter between bodies and what these bodies
are doing to one another, outside of consciousness?
Uncanny Strangeness
Similar thoughts occurred to me when reading Julia Kristevas book Strangers to
Ourselves. I was struck by a short paragraph which made my hair stand on end.
The relevant section of the book is a discussion of Freuds analysis of uncanny
strangeness. His analysis is of the ambiguity inherent in the term heimlich which
means friendly, comfortable but also concealed, kept from sight, deceitful and
malicious, behind someones back. This brings it into the sphere of its opposite
unheimlich uncanny strangeness. Somehow uncanny strangeness is simultaneously familiar. Kristeva calls this an immanence of the strange in the familiar.
That which is strangely uncanny is that which was (the past tense is important)
familiar and, under certain conditions (which ones?), emerges (1991: 183). In
particular the uncanny is often images of death, female sexual organs (in the case
of neurotic men) and, as Freud puts it the living person when we ascribe evil
intentions to him that are going to be carried out with the help of special powers
(Freud, SE17: 243, quoted in Kristeva, 1991: 185). The latter is of course the idiosyncratic individual. Then comes the chilling paragraph in question, Kristeva
comments that:
Such malevolent powers would amount to a weaving together of the symbolic and the organic
perhaps drive itself, on the border of the psyche and biology, overriding the breaking imposed
by organic homeostasis. A disturbing symptom of this may be found in epilepsy and madness,
and their presence in our fellow beings worries us the more as we dimly sense them in ourselves.
(1991: 185)
Anyone who has experienced or witnessed epileptic seizures is well aware of the
panic and sense of the uncanny which they can arouse. So what is an epileptic
seizure? A snowballing of anomalous, random neural activity washing through
the brain-substance, temporarily eradicating any virtual processes and
machines sustained within it (including consciousness) and replacing them with
what pure drive? The underlying patterns of anomalous neural activity, below
critical level, can be detected by an electroencephalogram. But anyone can, under
the right conditions, show these patterns of neural activity, and even suffer an
epileptic seizure. Kristeva writes about the uncanny strangeness of such
phenomena providing clues to the nature of normal psychological functioning,
and to the fragility of repression. What I am suggesting here is that the closely
related phenomenon of idiosyncrasy provides similar clues, as Adorno and
Horkheimer suggest. But what kind of clues? Can we take examples of other
Often Tourettics have remarkably increased reaction times and fantastic speed of
thought. Almost as though some brake or filtering mechanism were weakened
perhaps. When forced to reduce their speed to ours, their motor activity becomes
convulsive and filled with tics. Dr Bennett is afflicted with tics, constant bending
down, skips in his walking, grabbing, lunging, flinging, tendencies to touch and
touch again smoothing his moustache, balancing his glasses, making things
symmetrical in his visual field. This is all accentuated particularly when his stream
of attention is interrupted. He also produces strange utterances such as the highpitched high Patty, high there, hideous. Phrases, words and sounds become
enshrined in tics. So do names; Bennetts sons keep lists of strange-sounding
names from the radio, TV and newspapers. Bennett calls them his candy for the
mind.
Early on, Sacks notices Dr Bennetts wolf-like dogs with their strange, pale
eyes. Bennett talks to them in a high-pitched Touretty voice. When his children
come out to meet them as they approach the house, Sacks wonders if Bennett will
speak to them and pat them in the same way. Soon, however, Bennetts becomingmachine and becoming-animal is quite manifest:
I slept soundly in the Bennetts basement room that night, but in the morning I woke early,
roused by a strange whirring noise in the room next to mine the playroom. The playroom
door had translucent glass panels. As I peered through them, still half asleep, I saw what
appeared to be a locomotive in motion a large, whirring wheel going round and round and
giving off puffs of smoke and occasional hoots. Bewildered, I opened the door and peeked in.
Bennett stripped to the waist, was pedalling furiously on an exercise bike while calmly smoking
As Dr Bennett prepares for theatre there is the fantastic sight of his scrubbing up:
Something in the sterile field, the prohibition, seemed to stir his Tourettes; he made sudden
darting motions, or incipient motions, of his sterile, gloved right hand towards the ungloved,
unwashed, dirty part of his left arm. (1995: 87)
This comes together with a barrage of vocalisations Hooty-hooo! Hootyhooo! suggestive of a huge owl. At other times Sacks observes Bennett engaging in:
. . . a slow, almost sensuous pressing of the foot to mark out a circle in the ground all around
him. It seems to me almost instinctual, he said when I asked him about it. Like a dog marking
its territory. I feel it in my bones. I think it is something primal, prehuman maybe something
that all of us, without knowing it, have in us. But Tourettes releases these primitive behaviours. (1995: 79)
Now Sacks is interested in the way that Bennetts disease seems to disappear as
soon as he is in the operating theatre. His brain seems to slot into a completely
different set of striations his nervous system is suddenly normalized. But what
about the strange becoming-animal and machine, the strange vocalizations? It is
these lines of flight which interest Deleuze and Guattari and which for them
provide clues to the underlying functioning of the brain-become-subject. In A
Thousand Plateaus they discussed the theme of sorcery in relation to strange
becomings (1988: 23952). I want to argue, for the purposes of this article, that
the sorcerer is the idiosyncratic individual. Dr Bennett is to the extent that he
invokes feelings of uncanny strangeness, and has the power to affect people
deeply at a level below consciousness (without even knowing it) a sorcerer; a
kind of access point to the unconscious inhuman foundations of the human. I
want to argue that idiosyncrasy/uncannyness/sorcery is always a deep, physiological phenomenon. Bennetts idiosyncrasy is clearly of this kind, as it is known
to be the product of a neurological disorder. But all idiosyncrasy is ultimately of
this kind. Now we must look at the brain and nervous system itself to ask how it
becomes subject and how sorcery can be explained in terms of this production
of the subject.
The Brain and the Plane of Immanence
According to Deleuze and Guattari we need a little objective order to protect us
from the chaos. The world we are in is one of becomings happening at infinite
speeds. As soon as a thought comes it is going we are afraid of our thought flying
away- flying off half-formed blending into silence, colourlessness and nothingness the blank plane without nature or thought. As we are so afraid of
losing hold on our ideas we create fixed opinion in particular the belief in the
Cogito is an opinion an urdoxa. These provide protective rules of:
. . . resemblance, contiguity, causality which enable us to put some order into ideas, preventing our fantasy (delirium, madness) from crossing the universe in an instant, producing winged
horses and dragons breathing fire. (1994: 201)
Their own position is, then, allied to the second answer to each question. Cerebral maps are produced and broken up in fields of forces. Also there is no fixed
Cartesian command centre, rather there is a fluid and mobile centre which itself
is an effect produced by the operations and conditions of the whole brain, body
and nervous system. How might this claim be concretized? Deleuze and Guattari
give no details at this point this is why we must turn to other sources for a more
detailed account. While drawing on these other sources, I will constantly refer
back to Deleuze and Guattari in order to demonstrate the theoretical parallels
which make the claim that we are looking at a Bergsonian paradigm a justifiable
one.
Neuroscience
One of the key areas of debate in brain science has been the extent to which the
brains functioning can be characterized using computational metaphors. This is
not the place to rehearse these debates, but one of the main problems for
computer models of the brain derives from the variability of circuitry. The synaptic connections and growth are multiple, swarming and relatively unpredictable.
It simply is not possible that the function of each part of the neural circuitry is
determined in advance, such that the location and structure of various inputs,
storage facilities, and manipulations of data can themselves be predetermined in a
computational fashion. This is compounded by the fact that many synapses
appear to be inactive why is this? Certain active routes and connections appear
to develop in this probabilistically created network or surface how can this
happen without a programme?
The neuroscientist Gerald Edelman has developed the theory of neuronal group
selection to explain how such a network might develop. His basic argument is that
neuropsychological outcomes are the product, not of pre-programming, but of
selection. To put it another way, they are the contingent outcome of the resolution
of a multiplicity of forces only one of which is genetic constraint. Edelman believes
that his materialist theory of thought-brain can ultimately provide an explanation
for consciousness for what Deleuze and Guattari call the survey of the entire
field (1994: 209). But Edelman provides details where they provide none.
There are, according to Edelman, three levels of neuronal selection. First is
developmental selection. This is the process whereby cells are produced under
genetic constraint, led by chemical guides in their migration, adhesion and selective death. Through this process, what Edelman calls primary repertoires are
produced. They can be understood as the substances and surfaces containing
thought and feeling as pure possibility. They are Deleuze and Guattaris bodywithout-organs. This is the plane, the substance within/upon which the virtual
floats. The virtual can be understood here as a far from equilibrium environment
NON-SELF
Internal
homeostatic
systems
World signals
including
proprioception
Current
perceptual
categorization
Brain stem
hypothalamus
autonomic centres
1
Current registration
of internal states
and values
Semantic
bootstrap
3
Correlation in
hippocampus
amygdala, septum
Conceptual
A
catagorization
PRIMARY
CONSCIOUSNESS
Re-entrant loop
connecting
value-catagory
memory to current
perceptual
categorization
Broca's and
5 Wernicke's
areas
HIGHER-ORDER
CONSCIOUSNESS
Figure 1 Diagram showing Edelmans account of the material processes constituting consciousness in the organism
Source: Adapted from Edelman (1992: 132)
mapping that carries out categorization on value in a fashion that might be called
embodied (Edelman, 1992: 93). Importantly, without the values or homeostats
learning does not take place, somatic selection systems will not converge into
definite behaviours. This points to the importance of such homeostats for the
existence of epistemic hunger in all organisms including ourselves (See Figure
1 correlation between boxes 1, 2 and 3). It also hints at the weaknesses inherent
in any sociology which does not assume certain drive features in the human body.
Categorization of the world is then, at the lowest level, determined by this
resolution of forces between sensory sampling, re-entrant cortical mapping, and
re-entrant connections with other brain centres. But nobody is suggesting that
Edelmans automata are anywhere near to being thinking let alone conscious
creatures. So what else is needed?
through the abstraction of sensation. The fact that concepts are not primarily
linguistic does not of course negate Deleuze and Guattaris standpoint on philosophy in which it represents that branch of thought which can invent new forms
of experience precisely by linguistically engineering new conceptual personae.
Once the conceptual regime as an abstraction of sensation has been mapped to
language then it is, of course, possible to work backwards on sensation and
experience. Once the networks of mapping are established there is no fixed hierarchy. Language can, and does, deterritorialize the original non-linguistic conceptual schemas.
Consciousness
Consciousness is a further dynamic quality immanent in the thought-brain
surface at a higher level of complexity and organization. Again it is important to
notice that this immanent quality is not pre-programmed any more than any of
the others so far discussed. It results from the creation of re-entrant mappings and
loops on the basis of a resolution of forces (or competition/selection as Edelman
prefers to call it). He argues that in fact consciousness has two levels primary
and higher-order consciousness.
Primary consciousness is where events and objects, in time and space, are categorized, on value, so that causally unconnected parts of the world are bound
together into a scene Deleuze and Guattaris survey of the entire field.
. . . the salience of an event is determined not only by its position and energy in the world but
also by the relative value it has been accorded in the past history of the individual animal as a
result of learning. (Edelman, 1992: 118)
argues, along with Richard Dawkins, that a whole phase transition has effectively
occurred; a new kind of replicator has been born in the universe the so called
meme (Dennett, 1991: 200210; Dawkins, 1989: 189201). But Dennett remains
a methodological-individualist. He argues that the meme constitutes virtualmachines within the brain but of course the brain and its nervous system is an
open system. Language is a collective phenomenon, the appropriate unit of analysis cannot be the individual brain. In fact, of course, the meme constitutes virtual
machinic devices occupying whole complexes of nervous systems, bodies and
objects. This is what Deleuze and Guattari have, in the course of their work,
referred to as desiring machines or assemblages.
The Brain-as-Subject
So we come to the brain as subject how does the higher-order consciousness
resolve itself? Again Daniel Dennetts thought parallels Deleuze and Guattaris
remarkably closely. He argues for a de-centred subject, constituted by cultural
replicators immanent to the thought-brain surface. But, most importantly,
consciousness is the end product of a selection process (much like Edelmans)
which begins not in a hierarchy headed by a Cartesian command centre but with
chaos. He argues that throughout the brain there is a fantastic multiplicity of
spontaneously erupting experimental responses to outside conditions, drive
requirements and other stimuli. Through a resolution of forces most of these
experiments die away, only some survive to become conscious thought (the rest
is, of course, the unconscious). But it is here in the chaos (or pandemonium as
Dennett prefers to call it) that the creativity which defines human thought is born.
This is the vital spark which Deleuze and Guattari always affirm the power of
negentropy self-organization far from equilibrium it is pure affect, the
Bergsonian virtual.7 Dennetts theory of consciousness is entirely Bergsonian
(despite his own dismissal of Bergsonian vitalism).
It is in Dennetts demolition of the philosophical concept of qualia that we find
the most powerful sense of the brain as subject. It is not possible to do justice to
the full range of Dennetts critique in this area within the limits of this article, but,
to put it at its simplest, he argues that there are no ineffable qualities within a
special mental medium because there is no special medium within which the world
is represented within consciousness. Such a model of mental functioning is a
mistake brought about by Cartesian models of consciousness in which there is a
hierarchical structure of mental functioning. In such Cartesian models, a black
box containing the Cogito, or central meaner, as Dennett calls it, is at the top. It
sits in a special mental place or Cartesian theatre, where it has representations of
The brain is part of the mental continuum that is the world, the world produces
in the brain various dispositional states and fixations and judgements. The brain
modulates its structure in response to the world this is perception, communication and consciousness. Its full functioning includes far more than just
consciousness, but consciousness does not, cannot, exceed the brain and its direct
continuous connection to, and modulation with, the rest of the material world.
The brain, at a certain level of its functioning, simply becomes subject. In his
study of Henri Bergson, Deleuze makes the following, directly parallel, observation:
. . . there cannot be a difference in kind between the faculty of the brain which is said to be
perceptive and the reflex functions of the core. Thus, the brain does not manufacture representations, but only complicates the relationship between a received movement (excitation) and an
executed movement (response). Between the two, it establishes an interval (cart), whether it
divides up the received movement infinitely or prolongs it in a plurality of possible reactions.
(1988: 24, my emphasis)
system across one threshold after another up to, and including, consciousness. It
is with this in mind that we can now return to the question of idiosyncrasy how
does idiosyncrasy open up the contents of this interval to view?
Sorcery: Riding the Storm of the Virtual
In The Memories of a Sorcerer Deleuze and Guattari claim that we are all
possessed by continual becomings, becoming-animal, becoming-woman, becoming-child, becoming-molecular (1988: 23952). What can this mean?
Andr Dhotel knew how to place his characters in strange plant becomings, becoming-tree or
aster: this is not the transformation of one into the other, he says, but something passing from
one to the other. This something can only be specified as sensation. It is a zone of indetermination, of indiscernibility, as if things, beasts, and persons (Ahab and Moby-Dick, Penthesilia and
the bitch) endlessly reach the point that immediately precedes their natural differentiation. This
is what is called an affect. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 173)
The human is only a small and fragile part of us. We are infinite multiplicities. This
is not intended as a poetic metaphor, nor is it an exoticism of some kind, it is
intended, as the previous discussion has shown, as a statement of fact.
Wherever there is a multiplicity there is an exceptional individual or
Outsider. The Outsider is anomalous as opposed to abnormal. The latter deviates from rules in a way which ensures he remains within the system. The anomalous is no longer inside, he is unintelligible. This is the sorcerer he lives on the
boundaries representing heterogeneity (the virtual). He defines boundary by
virtue of his strangeness, he is or has made a pact with a demon in Dennetts
case demons in the plural.8 The Outsider is the access point to the line of flight,
the plunging into chaos, the virtual, pure perception. Lines of flight into
uncharted re-entrant mappings of the cortical surface, back into the molecular
de-simplified (in Henri Michauxs vocabulary) levels of perceptual categorization, and down into the frog brain.
. . . the anomalous. . . . Sorcerers have always held the anomalous position, at the edge of the
fields or woods. They haunt the fringes. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 2456)
Marks head, held it rigidly towards him, hissing, look at me! And Mark became
totally still, transfixed, as if hypnotised. Bennett finally says of the pandemonium, the virtual:
Its not gentle. You can see it as whimsical, funny be tempted to romanticise it but Tourettes
comes from deep-down in the nervous system and the unconscious. It taps into the oldest,
strongest feelings we have. Tourettes is like an epilepsy in the subcortex; when it takes over,
theres just a thin line of control, a thin line of cortex, between you and it, between you and that
raging storm, the blind force of the subcortex. (Sacks, 1995: 95)
what arouses it, and why it is sometimes socially useful and sometimes not,
however. Gilmore himself cannot, for example, explain what it is about the character Paco that arouses such aggression amongst his fellow villagers (Gilmore,
1987: Chapter 3). He is truculent, choleric, unsociable, lazy what is he
trying to say?
This man was a stranger to me. I had seen him before, but he was always alone and appeared
somewhat unsociable. This is of course very unusual, almost aberrant for a man in Andalusia.
(Gilmore, 1987: 30)
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Sean Watson teaches at the University of the West of England. He is currently writing a book on the
sociology of affect, complexity and the new Bergsonism.