Fragment of a theory of consciousness

...by elaborating the reciprocity of socialization and technical advancement. In order to establish the social, early man could not continue as before - he had to begin to deny himself, to regulate his behaviour. Nietzsche discusses this in On the Genealogy of Morals, and we will focus here on the idea that man had to become an animal capable of making promises. How could this be brought about? Memory had to be burned onto man. And this memory needed to be a certain sort of memory, a memory turned towards the future. To keep a promise, one must remember that one has made a promise, and use this memory to guide one's behaviour with a view to keeping that promise. To create this memory, man had to be given an originary 'punishment he would never forget'. With such training, the desire to do whatever one wants is overridden by the visceral fear of suffering. Nietzsche calls this a mnemotechnics. Crucially, this mnemotechnics also produces a memory for the technical. To explain: the function of memory in keeping a promise is also the function of memory with advanced tool use. In order to construct something in a process involving more than one or two simple operations, it is necessary to remember the aims of the intermediate steps. For example, I am preparing a stone in order to sharpen the blade of the knife with which I will cut the bamboo needed for the roof of my house. Without memory here, I would forget the point of my activity at each stage. So we have a projective memory, which allows man to undertake projects.

We ought to focus on this projective element for a moment. We see that the memory we have been talking about also has a constructive, imaginative aspect. We imagine a future in which we do not keep a promise and are punished, or in which we have built a house where there was none before. We begin to take our experiences apart to create new, possible experiences using this imaginative memory. What began as the taming of man's animal nature has developed into something much more significant: the birth of the mind. From its origin in early morality, this facility has become the motor of man's project-building, his artistic capacity, and interestingly, his status as the animal whose desire is structured as lack. Lack, because our projective power creates a cleavage between what exists and what could exist - the scenario or outcome which our projectively imaginative memory fabricates (once man began to sketch futures in his mind, the present reality started to appear as lacking something; I think Sartre's Pierre-who-was-not-there provides a good example of this). But I have neglected the most important change that took place at the dawn of humanity - man got the impression that he is free. Our ability to retrospectively imagine different alternatives to a choice we made leads us to think that we actually could have acted differently. Our ability to imagine various futures amongst which to choose (I could be a doctor, a lawyer, a fireman etc when I grow up) tricks us into thinking we have some kind of freedom to choose.

A brief comparison with Bergson could be instructive here. In Matter and Memory, he claims that those images which appear to consciousness are the images in relation to which we are free. The rest "pass through". What I have outlined above is not unrelated. Every perception we embellish with memories, which enrich the perceived, and furnish us with various possible courses of action in relation to that object. In contrast with Bergson however, I would argue that it is not our freedom which makes the image conscious, but our ability to produce alternatives to what is given to us. These are only my first, tentative thoughts, the thrust of which is this: conscious experience is produced by simultaneous, conflicting mental/neural events, the paradigmatic case being where one is provided by experience and the other by our imaginative memory. For example, we are aware of pain because it conflicts with our memories of the 'feeling' of our painless body (which is also why we get used to pain); in the moral case, it is our impulse to transgress which finds itself opposed by the conscience burned into our memory. On the other hand, one can walk to school or work without noticing anything on the way because there are no conflictual memories, because the same trudge has been done every day for years. Or, to be a little more ambitious, we might contend that our own brain function cannot become conscious because there could be nothing opposed to the experience of our own brain - the source of any conflictual mental/neural event is always already part of that with which it is supposed to conflict...

Work

I discovered today that, in 1914, Lenin gave a lecture in the building where I work. Surely the opportunity for a damning indictment of something. Exactly what shall hopefully become clearer as we go.

I work in a bar which, though it still has some connections with its past, provides strong evidence that times have changed. The customers are young-ish and cool-ish, but take neither to extremes. There are quite a few English speakers, probably because they find other cafés in the area too dirty. And we get lots of EU workers, mostly the ambitious work-experience people who think they can change the world and achieve wealth and success at the same time. You know, those folks who believe in saving the children but who must hang on to their faith in western capitalist democracy because life's little luxuries aren't going to buy themselves.

My bar is on the right-hand row of buildings, second from the right

There's no better way to start a monday morning than to clear away herbal tea detritus from a table covered in graphs and notes about 'climate change' and 'policy', while watching the otherwise attractive men and women sitting there 'networking'. Lenin, I apologize on behalf of humanity. Scattered around the rest of the room will be various Mac users directing the revolution from afar. Why would you take your computer to a café? If you are tired of fantasizing about the other customers, we have a rather good selection of newspapers (selected for our bobo client-base, obviously: The Guardian, Libération, Le Monde, Süddeutsche Zeitung, La Repubblica, El Pais and, er, L'Équipe).

At the moment we have on the walls a number of photographs of little black children in Africa gambolling about and looking cute. They are for sale, for 150 Euros each. The interesting question is, if our customers want to buy these photos, what are they going to do with them? Certainly not hang them in the dining room to marvel at whilst eating their cornflakes every morning. How do I know this? Our bar is one of the few not to allow buskers or street salesmen anywhere near the customers: "Move along my Gypsy friend. Yes they love the poor but they don't want to have to look at them..."

Another reason for my dislike of the budding eurocrats is that, while they figure out how to make a unified Europe more like the United States, I have a black job with zero security. My fate rests solely on whether les patrons are good to me or not. And although I have been lucky, some of my colleagues have been let go without notice. What is unsurprising is that all three of them had somewhat recalcitrant personalities (amongst other things, Catherine Malabou's analysis of plasticity and passivity seems relevant on this issue).

So, What Is to Be Done? In my case, nothing. I will continue to cling to my job by displaying ever greater levels of unquestioning submissiveness, all the while thanking my benefactors heartily for the opportunity.

Anonymous

Having read the post against blogger anonymity at larval subjects, I feel I should put forward some of my views, given that I have just started an anonymous blog.

As far as I can see larval is not really arguing against blogger anonymity so much as arguing that, since he and many others cannot be anonymous, neither should anyone else. I hope I'm not being too assholish but this smells of ressentiment. There is something rather frightening about the idea that an antisocial blogger should have "to suffer [...] real world consequences for how they’ve participated or engaged with others." Why should they? Surely being an asshole every day of their lives is punishment enough. Larval then goes on to outline how the philosophy job market works, and the risks involved with having a presence on the internet. The vision he describes is positively nightmarish, and I feel sorry for anyone who has to have any relationship with that world. Nevertheless, we must not allow this description of a (pathetic) state of affairs to become a moral framework.

The blogosphere offers the unique opportunity to be able to share ideas with philosophically and politically like-minded people in a context less formal than conferences etc, yet more sustained than drinks at the bar. In other words, the perfect place for a student of philosophy to come to explore ideas, to learn about new approaches and different views without being expected to hold a coherent and clearly thought through philosophical position. I don't want to be taking an "existential risk" with every post; I have enough of that every day I spend at work.

Larval clearly has a problem with the "paper trail" of life, as I do, but the blogosphere is a place to escape from that, not a place to be told that you cannot escape: "The person being criticized should be able to say x (not the screen name, but the person’s true proper name) argued y and y should be tied to that person." Let's not make the internet as much of a Kafkaesque hell as the real world. Anonymous blogging opens up an exciting space for the experimental production of personal identities, so I don't like being told I mustn't forget my passport.

The real evil here is not the online peanut gallery, but the world of professional philosophy, and particularly the link between thought and earning a living. Apparently employers will ask "whether this person is a colleague they would like to have for the rest of their lives." For a philosopher, the answer will often be no (and the employers are idiots for asking such a question). Would you like to have weekly departmental meetings with Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Rousseau, Althusser, Heidegger, Diogenes, Kant or Lacan? Probably not - they were all sociopaths in one way or another. But that is irrelevant here. They had interesting things to say. And that should be the guiding criterion, because I want to listen to the interesting people, whether they are polite or not.