Since, however, there seems to be so much misunderstanding, even deliberate misunderstanding, of the role of brain physiology, it occurred to me that a sharper knowledge of the relevant brain information might be relevant to the threads ongoing on lbo. So I posted a friend more knowledgeable in current neuroscience than I and got back a really useful post. I'm copying the whole exchange into this post. Passages in Curly Brackets { } are added in this post. Also please note that the main importance of neurological information is to establish what we do NOT know and (probably) CANNOT know, and the positive conclusions about human behavior which can be drawn from it are extremely limited.
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Post 1
_____, the two posts from me to lbo copied below should give you some idea of the context. In effect I'm mounting more or less of a frontal assault on (a) most specifically, Lacanian psychoanalysis, (b) more generally, Freudian psychology, and (c) most generally, psychology as such. In particular I am denying that social analysis must presuppose psychological explanation. The debate got recently centered in terms of "Desire," as discussed in the two posts below. Now, in the 20th century it is {unfortunately}very nearly counter-intuitive to argue that "Desire" does not exist. Obviously we feel desires. Now if I remember your posts, you were showing how at the neurological level cognition and emotion were separate in the brain but never separated in human behavior -- or something like that. Clarity on that general situation would be of help to me.
Later I'll send you some fine posts Yoshie wrote on Desire as a *social* and *political* category, having (in a capitalist economy) a dialectical relationship with scarcity, the one creating the other.
Thanks.
Carrol
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Post 1a Charles Brown wrote:
> When people find their basic "needs" fulfilled
> - and these themselves are very plastic - do they want less or more?
>
> &&&&&&&
>
> CB: First on the plasticity of needs: the idea of "need" is to refer
to something that is relatively unplastic. It is a necessity, it is a
limit w ithin which we must live such as enough food not to starve.
"Want" or "desire" is intended to refer to those things which are
'plastic". "Need" is intended to refer to more rigid requirements.
Charles, you're being sucked in and led where you do not need, and ought not desire, to go. "Needs," "necessities," whatever form part of the definition of the value of labor power, and the term is thus implicitly at the very heart of Marx's entire critique of political economy -- and Marx quite sensibly does not let himself be drawn into any endless haggling over definition. There is, he says at one point in *Capital* (Vol. 1) a "moral or historical" element in the value of labor power, and it is defined by the stuggle between capital and labor -- we are back again, then, to what are perhaps the single two most important propositions in Marx: His quotation from Faust (Im Anfang war die That) and his answer to the reporter's question, What Is?: Struggle. (Marx does note that it is in fact impossible to say what the minimum biological necessities for survival are. Attempting to define that would be a mug's game, and serious people should not concern themselves with it.)
There is a fine point here of some importance: Do we want to talk about "desire" or "desires"? The latter would be an empirical and historical investigation of some interest though not great theoretical importance. The former should be left to the theologians. The only respectable intellectual I know of who had any truck with it was William Blake, and it produced some good poetry. But then anti-semitism produced some good poetry.
Carrol =================
Post 1b Doug Henwood wrote:
> Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> >There is a fine point here of some importance: Do we want to talk
> > about "desire" or "desires"? The latter would be an empirical and
> >historical investigation of some interest though not great
> >theoretical investigation of some interest though not great
> >theoretical importance. The former should be left to the theologians.
>
> Carrol, I don't think I'd like to live in your utopia. Cue the
> Stooges, "No Fun."
When have I, ever, said one word
a) About the sort of future I envisage
or
b) In opposition to anyone having fun; pleasure, enjoyment, et cetera?
You seem to believe that human pleasure is not allowed unless it can be theoretically justified in advance?
{NOTA BENE: This last sentence misfired. I think it is true in some sense but it does not communicate clearly -- probably because the thought is not precise. Doug *does* I think demand more theory than is possible, but that needs to be brought out in a way that I haven't}
That empirical investigation of desireS would probably uncover quite a big pile of them. Most of them would doubtless be found legitimate on a case by case basis under concrete condtitions. In fact it would probably never occur to anyone to think they had to be justified. I just deny that one can establish any theological position (such as positing an abstract Desire) from such an investigation.
Carrol -----------------
Post 2
______,
This might be relevant also. It's my response to Doug's "demand" that I "explain" my depression -- and my denial that individual depressions, etc. *can* be explained in any of the senses he might want.
Carrol
Doug Henwood wrote:
> Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> >I.e., it is dogmatically assumed that everyone *must* have a theory
> >of psychology, as though no one could possibly not have such a
> >theory.
>
> I don't recall your answering my question - how you'd explain the
> fact that you're clinically depressed.
O.K. I really did intend not to go over the limit today. I think I did respond, but I can't locate the original post, so here goes. The earlier post also rejected the question, but I don't remember how I formulated the rejection, and this may differ.
I can give a partial *description* of all cases of clinical depression -- but not an explanation, if one demands (as I do) a fairly rigorous sense of explanation.
{NOTA BENE: I do not reduce depression to brain chemicals -- in fact I deny specifically that it can be so reduced. If one were discussing a long distance runner, one would have to account for the use of her legs. It would be rather stupid for someone to derive from that that one reduced running to legs, ignoring aerobic functions, the feelings of the particular runner on a particular occasion, wind velocity, etc. Brain chemistry is *always* "involved" in depression, as legs are always "involved" in running -- that is all.}
All cases involve disruption in the movement of serotonin -- but to say that was the cause would (a) go beyond current neurological knowledge, for we probably don't even have nearly a complete neurological description, and (b) merely name part of what needed to be explained rather than explain anything. Beyond that, anything physiological or behavioral or social that we might say about clinical depression would apply to *only* some proportion of all cases.
So in effect the demand for an explanation is a false demand. If you don't believe in God, you'll just have to live with it, as Eliot said referring to Arnold. There are no substitutes. The quest for some general explanation of individual behavior is futile, and a terrible (I would say destructive) deflection from the pursuit of attainable knowledge. My therapist tells me that there is always a sprinkling of patients who want to know "why." Her first response is to try to dissuade them from that desire. Those who persist are usually content with a label rather than an explanation, which is fortunate, because that is all that can be offered.
Carrol
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Post 3
Hello Carrol,
There are a whole series of responses I have to this issue of desire. The word doesn't mean a lot to me. I think like a lot of vaguely meaning words that arise from the Postmodernist point of view, desires lacks a cogent reference to basic human experience. If I desire someone sexually, what exactly is going on?
Your point,
Carrol,
Now, in the 20th century it is very nearly counter-intuitive to argue that "Desire" does not exist.
Makes sense to me in the standard example that someone who has had the channels cut or ablated or whatever trauma from the frontal lobe to the amygdala will no longer be able to feel various levels of emotions. The person will then exhibit most of what we culturally label rational understanding or utter what seems to be typical rational opinions. But not behave with good sense. Therefore the obvious point is that emotions are inseparable from rational behavior though the words are there to indicate their usually expressed views are the same. No amount of rational understanding in human beings produces balanced "rational" behavior without emotions. Therefore also there is a wholeness to human minds that requires the presence of certain components of thought. They must be interconnected. Or said slightly differently, a desire is not separate from consciousness. Emotion is not an essence, an instinct, an a priori like part of human nature. Emotion is a coarse grained memory of social experience, and internal physical experience.
In that sense I think it is correct to write as you do above that desire does not exist, or desire used in that way is a reification of emotions. I think seeing desire by itself is an artifact of separating emotions from mind in the Cartesian understanding of the world. Now there are in the disabled community various people who have disabilities which drastically reshape that way of relating to the world. For example, autism seems to be a serious injury to the ability to feel empathy for other minds or know that someone feels feelings. The high functioning autistic individual, Temple Grandon, says of her experience she has no sense of what other people feel in a manner like Spock on Star Trek. So one can see then that desire for another person is connected to the social sense most human beings have. I think that social meaning of terms like desire is important to understand as a labor process which people share back and forth rather than as something that issues from some deep well in the "soul".
We also experience emotions as being apart from conscious thoughts. For example if I feel depressed and I think to myself, stop being depressed, the depression does not obey the conscious thought. The separateness of feeling from words in the mind or other thought patterns has a lot to do with the issue of proprioception (internal sense of the body). That is we experience feelings as our body in space. This internal awareness is similar to how vision is separate from hearing. Even though as I write above that there is a whole to thought, we can experience distinct boundaries to feelings over consciousness, which is like the sense that vision or perception is different from thinking. We don't want to over ride proprioception with language production in the mind, any more than we want to over ride vision with thought, because that thought could influence vision would be experienced as hallucinating. The unification of the mind is mainly unconscious. We clearly can't self inspect and experience how feelings intermingles with language. But the physical evidence is clear enough.
Carrol, Attempting to define that would be a mug's game, and serious people should not concern themselves with it.)
I guess you mean that contingency of human experience shapes anything we might mean by desire. Which I put into my own words, means one can't put desires onto a pedestal of instinct or rules.
Carrol That empirical investigation of desireS would probably uncover quite a big pile of them. Most of them would doubtless be found legitimate on a case by case basis under concrete condtitions. In fact it would probably never occur to anyone to think they had to be justified. I just deny that one can establish any theological position (such as positing an abstract Desire) from such an investigation.
I think this summary statement on your part agrees fundamentally what I said above. I think your response to Doug, points at the quasi religious overtones of Doug's point of view. Doug is setting emotions apart from the body. That setting apart is really a source of religious conceptualizing. In some fundamental way Doug wants to understand desire as apart from the mind. In responding to you, he is attacking the Marxist sense of wholeness to things. Or as I write above he implies that emotions can be separated from thought, when that is not true. We can't experience the unification directly of our minds, but indirectly we can see how language production is united with feeling in human behavior. His statement that you believe human pleasure must be theoretically justified simply discounts that emotions are part of rational thought. Therefore Marxist being materialist would demand the whole as our understanding.
______
[Note: In the last two sentences there is an error in interpretation of who said what and why, but I don't think it harms the thrust of the post, though it may open up the need to explore that part of the original exchange a bit. Clearly my original post was less clear there than it might have been.]
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Post 4
________,
Thanks a lot for this post. You have gotten your ideas more firmly in mind than when you last dealt with this. I think I am going to copy your post into one of mine and send it to the list with minor additions.
Again, thanks a lot. I hope your depression is relatively quiescent at present. (For those of us who have had it for a long time, I don't think it is ever dead, just sleeping not too deeply.) The kind of reading and thinking you have been doing is important in several ways -- most specifically in the present instance in clearing the ground for social analysis relatively uncluttered by attempts at mind-reading and obsession with "psychological reception" or something like that. Your mention of autism and brain damage also reminds me that there is material in Sacks that can be used in this context.
Thanks again.
Carrol
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Post 5
Subject: Raw naked explanation or Tedium or Te Deum
Hello Carrol,
My response to your second note goes in another direction. What is explanation? In Korsakoff's syndrome, mostly a result of heavy drinking, short term memory has been destroyed. Someone can't remember what happened a few minutes ago. But people in this state weave elaborate explanations of what they encounter. For example, they see you come into the room. They confabulate 'I know you, you are the baker who married my daughter'. The person non-stop explains what they encounter without resort to memory. This suggests that explanation or creating a narrative of what we experience perceptually is a function of consciousness, and of the inner dynamic of language production.
Carrol: and my denial that individual depressions, etc. *can* be explained in any of the senses he might want.
Doyle One assumes in Doug's point of view explanation could be uttered in such a way that causally show why things are like they are in consciousness (which is a resort to objective or Cartesian understanding of how the mind works). But consciousness issues from many parts that are beneath consciousness. For example, emotions as we experience them don't have discernable detail as does vision. To causally explain something means to assemble the part of consciousness we see in Korsakoff's syndrome above with a memory of causation in experience. That neglects contingency, and ignores that parts of the mind can't be inspected in a way for us to show causation. For example remembering names, I can't explain why I can't remember names. I can say I know that blood flow to parts of the temporal lobe goes down with age, and the best evidence we have is that names are remembered in parts of the temporal lobe which in turn would be affected by less blood flow to not function as robustly as when I was younger. But I can't utter the explanation of my experience causally.
Contingency is important in this, because neural networks must learn from experience. So depression issues from experience as well as vulnerability of individual brains. I had a discussion about depression last night with a friend. She doesn't take anti-depressants because her Mother and Sister have manic depression (bi-polar mood disorder). Were she to take anti-depressants, and her family history of vulnerability to mood disorder indicates a strong chance to lead to manic-depression emerging in her. In other words physical events of taking an anti-depressant would form causally the manic-depression. The thought can't be explained objectively, we can't know that for sure would happen, but the environment contingencies are there to suggest that she avoid using anti-depressants.
My view is that explanation like a lot of things in this culture is given a kind of all knowing quality through the philosophical understandings that issue from a Cartesian theory of the mind.
An absolute understanding conveyed by explanation of the origin of depression is a Cartesian based attempt to keep the mind separate from the body in a speculation about how the mind works.
Carrol: Beyond that, anything physiological or behavioral or social that we might say about clinical depression would apply to *only* some proportion of all cases.
Another friend who has depression has often remarked on that. She does not respond to anti-depressants except that she feels worse not better. If one looks at the drugs produced for anti-depressants, and ______ suggested to me a book called "Blaming the Brain" which goes into the stupidity of that industry, there is often no underlying understanding of the drugs. Something gets found, it is economically viable in the companies basic estimate, and they try it out willy nilly on all and asunder. My friend is a good example of how they just don't know why she doesn't respond. The point is that like you wrote a false demand to know what is unknowable within the present context of the United States. But I would add this demand falls back upon various kinds of absolute understanding of the mind.
----------------
To repeat once more. Doug's request that I "explain" my depression is a false question, and since it is a demand for knowledge we do not have, it moves in a religious direction. Freud, anxious to avoid religion, moved towards a vulgar biologism. That may be involved in the concept of "Drive" as Lacan and Zizek use it. At least it seems to me that the only way to make sense of such a thing is reducing it to a "state of the soul" (religion) or some biologically determined "instinct." Both are unacceptable Zizek seems to be recognizing this in his efforts at rapprochement with religion.
Carrol