DA/NG: Could you elaborate on the neurological definition of plasticity—the spectrum between its creative and destructive nature? And perhaps also on the discrepancy between cognitive networks and emotion, reason and affect?
CM: In my tradition, which is Continental philosophy, the brain had never been an object of philosophical elaboration. In philosophy, both historical and contemporary forms like deconstruction or philosophies of difference, the source for human creativity was a series of, not exactly faculties, but spaces, which could be named “spirit”, “mind”, “critical power”, “judgment”, or “memory” in Bergson. But the brain had been very seldom thematized, maybe for the first time by Aristotle, who said that it was the principle of life in living beings, and then later on by Descartes and a little by Bergson, but only insofar as the brain was an instrument whose function was to transmit information, and never to interpret it. On its own, it didn’t have any capacity for representation or thinking, and no emotion at all. If the brain had an enemy, it was emotion. This was the background against which I started to discover the brain in the light of recent neurological research, according to which the brain not only appears as the basis for all intellectual processes, but also for emotional reactions. The discovery of what Antonio Damasio calls the “emotional brain,” was a total revolution for me: the idea that all affects are brain-induced phenomena. Perhaps this wasn’t easy to accept, but that all of our affects—joy, sadness, anxiety, etc.—are a mix of neurotransmitters, dopamine, serotonin… Now it is not possible to try to describe or consider an emotion without referring to these chemical or neural processes.
Why was this so important for me? Because in neurology, and also in everyday life—I mention my grandmother in my book The New Wounded—we started discovering that some people had lost their emotions. The problem of emotions became central, I would say, around thirty years ago, with the study of all these neural diseases, where we saw that some people had become, as Damasio says, cool, seemingly without emotions. This meant that emotions could be lost, could disappear. But this had not been considered in the philosophical tradition. When Heidegger said we are attuned to our world through emotions, he never imagined that these emotions could disappear. Even indifference in philosophy, for example in Descartes, is analyzed as an emotion. So the idea that emotions can disappear, can be destroyed, is how I first came to think of destructive plasticity, that there was this kind of destructive power in the brain. This is what brought me into this new neurological realm.
Most of the time, people say, “we cannot compare the living brain to the cybernetic one, because a computer is unable to feel.” Emotions are supposedly the proof that there’s a difference between a human brain and a cybernetic brain. Yet if you read the foundational texts by cyberneticians, like [Norbert] Wiener, they say that their dream is to build a cybernetic system that is able to become depressed, to lose its functions. We discover that the goal of cybernetics has always been not only to produce efficient machines, but also to produce machines that break down and function as if they had lost their intelligence. Wiener says that when building our machines, we should read contemporary psychology, because what we want to do is create a comparable kind of breakdown, a comparable depression, in machines as in humans. Here again, destructive plasticity might also be a cybernetic capacity.
DA/NG: How ought we interpret cerebral structures operating within global capitalism, particularly with disembodied or remote working? You investigate the conditions under which the brain performs its labor, and in Avanessian and Hennig’s analysis of your work, “our living brain becomes the object of a historical-materialist labor ethics.” In the era of collective intelligence, what is to be said about the labor of the brain?
CM: If we go back to this identity of the organic brain and the cybernetic brain, I would say that the most striking form of brain labor is dealing with the computer as a mirror. I think this is what is asked from us today, by demanding capitalistic forms of labor—to find a way to deal with the mirroring of yourself in the machine. For example, right now when I’m speaking to you via video chat, whom am I speaking to? Am I speaking to you, or am I speaking to the machine, or am I speaking to myself through you, and through the machine? We are having to develop a new concept of alterity. To what extent is the machine an Other? Even if the body, the rest of the body, is also involved in video conferences, remote teaching, and so on, it is clear that the organ that is most at work is the brain. This has been heightened since the beginning of the pandemic, because in these kinds of online exchanges, we are working essentially with our brains; the body is still while the brain does everything. People have long talked about cognitive capitalism, that the brain has been the center of cognitive accumulation for almost fifty years, but the situation is evolving. Now it is not only a question of cognitive accumulation, but of redesigning the whole world through this new mirroring process of having to deal with sameness and otherness at the same time. Currently, we are not producing commodities, we are producing new relationships, and I would say that this is the most significant aspect of brain labor today.
DA/NG: The world is a production of our brain, and our brain certainly has the capacity to create a wonder-inducing world for us, yet at the same time brains are a production in their own right, involving us in continued participation to reach truths and a consciousness of social history. We love this quote from your work: “The brain is a work, and we do not know it. We are its subjects—authors and products at once—and we do not know it. ‘Humans make their own history, but they do not know that they make it,’ says Marx, intending thereby to awaken a consciousness of historicity. In a certain way, such words apply precisely to our context and object: ‘Humans make their own brain, but they do not know that they make it.’”
CM: The brain and the world mirror themselves through reciprocal processes of adaptation and creation. There is a movement of going outside of one’s self, and of assimilating all the modifications internally. Marx speaks in terms of consciousness, and the problem is that the brain is not conscious of itself. Consciousness of the brain is impossible. I was fully aware of the fact that when I wrote the book What Should We Do with Our Brain?, it was kind of a lost cause, because you can write pages and pages, and people won’t ever become conscious of their brains because the brain escapes consciousness. This is another type of dialectical problem: How is it possible to produce something that could be a form of brain consciousness? There have been many discussions recently about the Anthropocene, about the ecological crisis, around the question: How can we explain that even if the ecological crisis is produced by humanity, even if this crisis is massive, visible, obvious—the virus is one example of this—how come some people can still negate it, saying, “No, no, it’s fine, there’s no ecological crisis”? This problem, which is exploited by politicians, is crucial; that it is very difficult to produce the consciousness of something that happens below the threshold of consciousness. Humanity has become a geological force able to transform nature. But how are we able to produce a consciousness of that if we are a geological force? How is it possible to produce a consciousness of the brain if the brain is an unconscious structure? This can only be a political question. Marx had exactly the same problem; when he talked about consciousness he knew perfectly well that class struggle could not be immediately conscious, because otherwise it would have been fought against earlier. The problem of Marxism, and more generally the problem of politics today, is how to produce a political discourse that is able to compensate for this lack of consciousness.