The mind is the idea of the body
I’ve been reading various interesting books recently. I picked up a cheap copy of Laclau’s Emancipation(s), with its crazy post-modern punctuation and crazier post-marxist politics. I’m briefly comparing the Laclau-Mouffe position on hegemony to Badiou’s concept of the situation in something I’m writing; but Laclaus’s position turns out to be more interesting than I remembered, which makes me think that a sustained confrontation between him and Badiou could be worthwhile (particularly on the particularity/universality stuff). I’m not sure what Laclau’s up to these days; the early-nineties rush to liberalism now looks almost incomprehensibly dated.
Even more dated than the Manchester cyberpunk of Jeff Noon’s Vurt. Vurt is a take on an idea that a lot of cyberpunk worked with (most notably, Neal Stephenson — although his best treatment comes in the non-cyberpunk Cryptonomicon), that there is at bottom _no distinction_ between matter and information. Noon dramatises this with a set of overlapping metaphors around virtual reality/psychadelics/psychics/transhumans which combine to create an impressively precarious sense of what physical reality is supposed to be.
Which, paradoxically, is a very materialist position to be in, and I’m pleased to see that’s the position Damasio is taking in Looking for Spinoza. I haven’t got that far through it as I’ve been reading it in my lunch break at work (although for improved epater les bourgeois effect, I might switch to reading Geo’s spare copy of Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies. Obviously I’m very impressed that he _had_ a spare copy). It’s an interesting counterpoint to the Badiou stuff (as undercurrent points out); I wonder if there’s an affinity between Damasio and Badiou in that they use a generalised reflexivity (bodies referring to bodies in Damasio, sets of sets in Badiou) to accomplish in a materialist fashion what was once thought to require transcendence. That is to say, matter is information, the mind is the body.
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A sense of reality as being less than fixed, as being a product of interpretion, is where contemporary materialist thought and “magic” overlap. IN “magic” one manipulates others’ senses of concrete reality in order to win personal advantages. In the conceptualisation of a materialist, physiological basis for reality, one explores the fact that one’s sense of reality can be altered by chemicals in the body. Postmodernism — neither magic nor physiological experimentalism — makes an intellectual exercise out of this discovery of society’s epistemic fragility.
Comment by Jennifer Armstrong @ 3/29/2005 1:48 am