Mystical Anarchism and A Taste of Faith 1

The Number and the Beast

Quentin Meillassoux’s follow up to After Finitude, Le Nombre et la sirène (2011), seeks to ground his idea of the absolute in the secrecy of numerical code in an elaborate commentary on Stéphane Mallarmé’s (1895) ‘Un coup de dés’ (1895). Through a painstaking task of counting and re-counting the words of the poem, Meillassoux lights upon the number 707 which he finds is both a cipher for the future of poetry and a figure for chance itself. Poised between the ‘7’ that is the sign of chance and the ‘7’ of the classic French alexandrine meter is the 0 that symbolizes the abyss that yawns open in the absence of God, giving way to the eternal contingency of hyperchaos.

Given the question raised by the poem concerning ‘LE NOMBRE’ of the ‘ultérieur démon immémorial’ and its existence, and whether or not it is an hallucination éparse d’agonie, and moreover notwithstanding Meillassoux’s painstaking attempts to count it, this intensely symbolist poem is no doubt also referring to another literary demon. Indeed, not simply a demon but the apocalyptic beast of the sea that is encoded with another number that its author calls on the reader to enumerate: ‘Here is wisdom. Let him who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man: His number is 666’ (Rev.13:18). A dice throw that did not abolish chance might be one that came up six after six after six, for as Meillassoux insists absolute chance – contingency – has nothing to do with probability (see Meillassoux, 2008: 105). 666. These were the numbers that came up for Francesco Petrarch the poet, with devastating effects. The code for all blasphemy, persecution and evil, for hatred and the apocalypse, is also the code for love and the love of perfection, for Divine form. Is this pure chance?

With reference to Meillassoux’s text, Mallarme’s and others in the canon for whom the numerological drive is central (Dante, Petrarch), this paper speculates on the form and affects of numbers as a particulate system heterogeneous to language. As such it will consider the essential meaninglessness of numbers, whose enigmas yet inflame the amorous intensities of poets, mystics and psychotics. It will also consider how far away this is from the claims made for mathematical knowledge of the universe and its laws, as if algebraic formulae were likewise the means through which God speaks to scientists in His own language. In the absence of God and indeed faith in science, yet giving up on neither perhaps, we can no doubt take number 666 as another sign – not necessarily of contingency, but of that base matter that inhabits the horror of its Idea.

Abstract for ‘Thinking the Absolute: Philosophy, Speculation and the End of Religion’ conference, June 29 – 1 July, Liverpool Hope University, UK. You can register here

Facebook: the structure that took to the streets

‘In a lot of ways, Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company. We have this large community of people, and more than other technology companies we’re really setting policies’. Mark Zuckerberg.

The news that Facebook has a population greater than the US and the EU put together (BBC2 04.12.11) reminds us that the company’s aspirations tend towards a proximate ‘statehood’ than simply profit. As such, its ‘revolutionary’ potential is not neutral. The question therefore concerns what kind of social bond or social contract it instantiates. A very good indication is outlined at the beginning of David Kirkpatrick’s The Facebook Effect (2010), the authorized history of the company. He tells the story of a campaign against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC) which again reminds us that Facebook’s political utility is perfectly equivocal such that it can just as easily become a tool for counter-revolution, for popular revolt in support of a weakened and ineffective state.

“Oscar Morales was fed up,” begins the book, because the Columbian’s holiday period, like much of the country apparently, was being disturbed by “the suffering of a little boy named Emmanuel” who was being held hostage along with his mother Clara Rojas and others including the politician Ingrid Betancourt by FARC. Expectation was high that at least little Emmanuel, if not all the hostages, would be released by Christmas 2007 as a result of negotiations between the guerrillas and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. By the New Year the boy still hadn’t been released, but to everyone’s surprise in early January the Colombian President Alvaro Uribe announced that Emmanuel was no longer in the hands of the FARC, but in foster care. For Morales and many others, this was the last straw. “People were happy because the kid was safe, but we were so fucking angry [...] we felt assaulted by the FARC. How could they dare negotiate for the life of a kid they didn’t even have? People felt this was too much. How much longer was the FARC going to play with us and lie to us?”.

Morales set up a Facebook Group called Un Millon Voces Contra Las FARC (A Million Voices Against FARC). Information about the Group and its plea was rapidly distributed through Facebook’s ‘social graph’, and in a few weeks the Group had thousands of members, and a large demonstration was organised. The demonstration attracted the attention of the Press as indeed did the novel means of its organization and the campaign spread further – in the process expanding the number of Facebook users since it was new to Columbia and associated only with ‘kids’ (4). The very visibility of the numbers of the Group emboldened the campaigners –“Facebook gave Columbia’s young people an easy, digital way to feel comfort in numbers to declare their disgust” – and the site itself provided a key point of organization and liaison. “Facebook was our headquarters ... It was the newspaper ... the central command ... the laboratory” (Morales quoted by Kirkpatrick, 5). President Uribe eventually succeeded in negotiating the release of the hostages but the Facebook campaign and the demonstration were credited with applying pressure on the FARC. Oscar Morales’s “group and the subsequent demonstration made him into a national and international celebrity” (6).

The anecdote illustrates nicely how Facebook establishes a social bond though the production of ‘faces’: the new technology of the social networking site enables Oscar Morales to become the face of the protest against FARC, and ultimately achieve ‘celebrity’. In Seminar XVII Lacan famously organizes the social bond across four terms:

agent other
truth production

It is clearly Facebook and the Group it enables (Un Millon Voces Contra Las FARC) that is the ‘agent’ here, addressed to the ‘other’ whose reference is FARC. The authority and ‘truth’ of the Facebook Group is grounded in the number of members of the Group galvanized in relation to the guerrillas. Although they were in the thousands rather than millions (there not being enough Facebook users in Columbia at the time), millions of people did demonstrate in cities across Columbia, inspired by the Group. In contradistinction to the inhuman facelessness of FARC, then, Facebook produces Oscar Morales as the (human) face of a Group actually made up of thousands of other faces like so many pixels or the digital code into which the face dissolves in the original Facebook logo.

The four main forms of the social bond for Lacan are the discourses of the Master, the Hysteric, the University and the Analyst. It seems to me that Facebook, appropriately given that it was developed at Harvard, is an example of University discourse in which knowledge (S2), supported by the signifier of the master (S1), is in the position of agent which, through its address to the lack constitutive of desire (objet petit a), produces the subject ($).

A certain modification is necessary however in order to discuss Facebook as a form of social bond with regard to this structure. Facebook is certainly a product of the University, but does not so much represent the ‘knowledge’ of the University as its ‘information’; it is not the agent of operative knowledge, but operative information. As such the structure can organize all the rankable degrees of University life on the same plane from social grooming to academic and professional achievement.

Famously, Facebook was developed at Harvard in a kind of perversion of its bureaucratic procedures. All Universities, colleges and fraternities had a ‘facebook’ of passport-style photographs that are held along with other information as a record of its staff and students. Zuckerberg and his colleagues, initially through Facemash leading to theFacebook used these procedures as a means for student enjoyment: self-promotion, narcissism, dating, voyeurism and so on. From the very beginning there was something ‘superegoic’ in the way in which its ‘obscene’ content (the inspired by the initial idea of comparing female students’ faces to farm animals for example) was conveyed by the apparent neutrality of bureaucratic form. Accordingly, the signifier (S1) that is the governing support of Facebook (S2) is not the name of a Master or a governing Idea of the University (Truth, Culture, Excellence), but a number (1) that stands for numbers generally, metrics, statistics, quantification and so on. The ‘knowledge’, then, if there is any, is statistical information that is operative through the manipulation of computerized data through the use of algorithms. With the Oscar Morales story, number (Un Millon Voces) provides the hyperbolic, even performative command that brings the Group into being as a mass, and its authority as a number provides its ‘comfort’ and security.

As everyone knows there is something uncanny about passport photographs and their inability to deliver a satisfyingly narcissistic image of one’s face (enabling them to be compared to farm animals, for instance). I don’t recognize this image; it’s not me! It is as if the photo booth steals some aspect of the face essential to its enjoyment as a mirror image. The digital face-making, or prosopopeia of Facebook, is predicated upon a generalized prosopagnosia (or prosop – a – gnosia) where the a stands for the lost enjoyment stolen by the bureaucratic passport photograph. However, the theft of enjoyment in the Oscar Morales story concerns the fact that he and his countrymen were cheated by the FARC of the collective joy that would have been brought by the sight of the face of Emmanuel, his suffering relieved by his release on Christmas day. The fact that he was quietly released by the hostages into a foster home without fuss or announcement seems to have produced an irrational rage in the Columbians, strange given the possible alternative: “People were happy because the kid was safe, but we were so fucking angry” (Kirkpatrick, 1). It is therefore into this gap, marked in its absence by the suffering or joyful face of Emmanuel in the field of mediatized visibility, that Facebook pours its information, a million faces combining to producing Oscar Morales as Columbia’s first Facebook star, making him “a national and international celebrity” (6). As such, however, he inevitably loses something, loses his offline, off camera ordinariness, becoming vulnerable to the harsh light of media attention and expectation as a hero of political and moral virtue.


Lacan presented his theory of the four discourses in the context of the events of May 1968, most notably in a rowdy exchange with students at Vincennes. Memorably, Lacan claimed that “the aspiration to revolution has but one conceivable issue, always, the discourse of the master”. At the same time, as Matthew Sharpe notes, Lacan also made the claim that university discourse “is increasingly becoming the dominant form structure of social relations”. While Lacan initially had in mind “the societies of the now-former Soviet bloc”, Sharpe shows that new forms of advertising in their ‘superegoic’ appeal to transgressive (as opposed to officially sanctioned) enjoyment are organized according to the same structure, since advertising “faces, and educates, a more or less unformed, ignorant individual” which it compels to consider, “from a quasi-superegoic position of neutral self-observation ... what we really are and really want, beneath whatever social masks and roles we may from time to time have taken up”.

Since about 2008, Facebook’s core business, its means of making money, has been advertising, but it is claimed that this is purely a means rather than an aim, and in any case “the word advertising is really no longer the right word for what is going on at Facebook” (Kirkpatrick, 263). Rather, Kirkpatrick argues that Facebook provides a space in which producers and consumers interact to the point of becoming indistinct as mutual users of the site. From the beginning “Thefacebook had no content of its own. It was merely a piece of software – a platform for content created by its users” (31) in which marketers can now pay for visibility for their products but “can no longer control the conversation” about them (263). For Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook ‘monetization’ merely generates the revenue necessary for a much more profound social project. The company is “founded on a radical social premise – that an enveloping transparency will overtake modern life”, and this premise is the foundation of Facebook’s utopian promise. As the story of Oscar Morales relates, Facebook can be an effective tool working for popular causes in the aid of the state – no doubt in other states it can work against them. As such, however, Facebook is not a neutral ‘tool’ for the political expression of popular reason. It is a form that is itself transformative of other political structures, ushering in a new kind of governmentality. “In a lot of ways”, Zuckerberg argues, “Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company. We have this large community of people, and more than other technology companies we’re really setting policies”. While particular technology companies are always vulnerable to the rapid exploitation of new technological innovations and a certain boredom threshold concerning their formats, Facebook has it seems made a decisive breakthrough in its reformatting of the social bond. In its infinite streams of commentary, ‘likes’ and followers of Groups and interests, Facebook has transformed the meaning of ‘Friendship’ and opened it up so that a transparent – or ‘transparental’ – love has become the principle of a new technology of neoliberal governance. Whatever the fate of Facebook, for this model to become truly revolutionary would require a further turn clockwise towards the discourse of the Master in which love for the face of the ‘transparental’ One, the index of the multiple, supports the total operationalization of social reality without remainder other than the facelessness that is produced as its surplus and condition.

From Scott Wilson, ‘Prosopopeia to Prosopagnosia: Dante on Facebook’ in Glossator 5 (2011): 19-56.

Musca amusica and the sound of Ba’al Zebûb’s ascension

Halo of Flies Over My Head
I am decaying Satan's Wrath
The one to walk planet earth alone
Spreading disease, death and war ... Impaled Nazarene, ‘Halo of Flies’ All That You Fear (2004)

Attractive to the flies ... I am their mephitic trough ... a buzzing which engulfs all ...
Through compound eyes / I envision eternity
Lugubrum, ‘Attractive to Flies’, De Vette Cueken (2004)

Flies are a frequent trope in both black and death metal. For the latter, buzzing flies pullulating over a rotting corpse lyrically figures death metal’s pulverizing a-subjective affections of the body; for the former, flies are related to a metaphysical problem bound up not so much to the paradoxical notion of the death of God but the death and deification of Satan.

While there are numerous reference to flies in the various genres of metal (perhaps since Iron Maiden) the ultimate reference is to Satan or Beelzebub as ‘Lord of the Flies’, or as Malkuth put it, ‘Great Black Goat God (Lord of the Flies)’ (1994). A Hebrew insult at the followers of the God Baal, ‘dung flies’, ‘ba’al’ ‘zebub’ emerges in the Christian tradition, sometimes as another name for Satan himself, but more interestingly as an angel who successfully stages his own infernal rebellion, displacing Satan to second spot just above Euronymous, according to Weyer’s demonology. Beelzebub, Lord of the Flies, then, is also a figure for the overthrow or overcoming of Satan and the ascension of some other order, the order of dung flies.

The reference is picked up in metal (from Iron Maiden, across numerous genres) where there are also gestures towards Golding’s famous novel in which Satan is already a rotting animal’s head: the sacrificial offering to the Beast misperceived as the Beast itself. Or rather become the beast through the hideous teeming acephalic noise of the flies that swarm about its decapitated head. The process of self-identification and self-transcendence that hold the God-Satan-Man triad together is transformed through consumption. Flies, not Man, maketh the Beast, but first through turning the flesh into ‘a mephitic trough’, a Styx of digestive liquid’ (Lugubrum) in which ‘Transformed man [is] dethroned’, Nominon, ‘Hordes of Flies’ (2005). For Nominon, then, the process of complete post-parasitical transformation – ‘Innate insects part of me /Parasite inside eating me / Host of flies born inside – sees the Satanic ‘Beast’ (the satanic multiple) resurrected from the swarming darkness of base matter where death has no dominion: ‘Absence of life I am the lord of flies’. Companion species, no doubt, since the migration of homo sapiens from Africa, musca domestica have lodged in the margins of human civilization, incubating and pupating in its shit and garbage, feeding on wounds and rotting flesh, defecating and vomiting waste matter teeming in deadly bacteria and viruses: typhoid, cholera, dysentery, tuberculosis. In black metal’s buzzing, musca domestica musica, flies are both the locus of amusical ex-sistence and figure of Satan’s divine inexistence and return. ‘Through compound eyes / I envision eternity’.
My abstract for PEST, Black Metal Theory Symposium Date: Sunday 20 November 2011, 14.00-Close
Location: The Pint Bar, Eden Quay, Dublin, Ireland

Rhythm, a-rhythmia and the Revolutionary Drive

‘Brains are foretelling devices and their predictive powers emerge from the various rhythms they perpetually generate. At the same time, brain activity can be tuned to become an ideal observer of the environment, due to an organized system of rhythms’. György Buzsáki, Rhythms of the Brain.

‘Humans are the only species to spontaneously synchronize to the beat of music’.
A.N. Patel, Music and Language

‘[There is no] assimilation of the drive to a biological function, which always has a rhythm. The first thing Freud says about the drive is, if I may put it this way, that it has no day or night, no spring or autumn, no rise and fall. It is a constant force. All the same, one must take account of the texts and of experience.
Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI.

‘Rock and roll as well as jazz was what they called “imperialist music”… [Guevara] hated artists, so how is it possible that artists still today support the image of Che Guevara?”
Paquito D’Rivera.

If the problem of whether ‘time and space are situated in our minds only or whether they in fact exist independently’ is intractable (Buzsáki, 8), it is rhythm, according to neuroscientist György Buzsáki, that provides the means for the brain to shape its own sense of reality in its negotiation with its environment. Rhythm produces a sense of time, allowing for anticipation, and the imagination of exterior space. For A.N. Patel, the ability to perceive a regular beat is, similarly, ‘anticipatory rather than reactive ...’ and is fundamental, not a byproduct of [other more clearly adaptive] cognitive mechanisms’ (402). Beat perception appears to be an event in the evolutionary history of human beings, the always already cultural yet universal means of establishing a collective. ‘In every culture, there is some form of music with a regular beat, a periodic pulse that affords temporal coordination between performers and elicits a synchronized motor response from listeners’ (Patel, 402). It seems that groups, tribes, nations have always been one under a groove.

It was Jacques Attali who first related music, as a particular organization of noise, to social order, and this paper looks at rhythm as a means of establishing a social bond in a way that is heterogeneous to language. Using various examples, including the arrhythmia of Che Guevara (neither he nor Eva Peron could dance, and both hated the tango), the paper also introduces a quasi-psychoanalytic concept of a-rhythmia in which rhythm is equivalent to the drive’s Vorstellung, thereby becoming the locus of cultural dissatisfaction and discontent. It looks at how the a-rhythmic drive is a revolutionary force in the sense that it revolves around an impossible (extimate) object that holds the place of another conception of social reality, that is to say some Other (groove) Thing (or Thang).

Abstract for the Rhythm and Event Symposium
10am-7.30pm 29 October 2011
King’s Anatomy Theatre & Museum, 6th Floor, King’s Building
King’s College London, Strand Campus, London, WC2R 2LS

Capsule presents ... Home of Metal Conference, 1-4 September 2011

University of Wolverhampton and Lighthouse

Science and Truth

(On an unconscious that isn’t one, but something of the one)

The apparent contradiction in the UK government’s decision to cut all funding to Arts, Humanities and Social Science subjects at University in order to open them to market forces while protecting Maths, Engineering and Science betrays something more interesting than the limits of pure competition theory or ultimate market failure. This decision shows that neoliberalism is an art of government, of course, as much as a mechanism of economic growth (as Foucault anticipated in the late 1970s), but perhaps more profoundly, it shows that in the UK at least, science is now the official bearer of truth. The decision concurs with Steven Hawking’s view that science is all we need to answer the big questions of philosophy, and the latter can fight for its survival among the other idols of the marketplace. Science has even superseded literature, Darwin having displaced Shakespeare as the touchstone of National Genius.

Scientific truth is not, of course, an effect of individual genius, but is grounded in scientific method and in the production of a number of (mathematical) correspondences that appear to cohere with certain regularities generated by nature or the real. Science does not speak the truth since these regularities are not found in language but in numbers or formulae. What or where is a truth that no longer speaks – not even of itself in the guise of a metalanguage? Is it a truth that counts, or is counted, or that counts itself (as truth)? For science to tell the truth, numbers would have to speak, a goal that the psychotic mathematician John F Nash Jr. set for himself (Nasar, 2001: 336), the same Nash whose famous ‘equilibrium’ is supposed to justify both the economic efficiency and the social benefits of neoliberalism. Naturally, the Browne Reports’ prioritisation of Science and Technology is not just recognition of the burden of truth and destiny that these subjects now seem to bear, but about generating another set of numbers that will reproduce and sustain the current system of social and economic relations.

For those of us brought up under the shadow of Matthew Arnold in the tradition of literary and cultural studies this decision shows that the governing class in the UK has finally given up on the idea that liberal culture has an essential ‘social mission’ or ideological function, as Althusserians used to say. Of course this has been evident for a long time. Even as some of us were busy deconstructing the ‘Shakespeare Myth’ back in the 1980s the governing idea of the University was already moving away from Culture to Excellence, an essentially vacuous term under which the University was transformed from a pedagogical institution to a mechanism for the exchange of information whose governing structure, if not metaphor, is the networked computer. Disciplines became stripped down to a set of equivalent ‘key skills’ to be cashed into the service economy. As we all know, the ability to savour poetic ambiguity, where it occurs, is a fringe benefit relative to a student’s aptitude for ppt presentations.

The neoliberal experiment in government has sought to construct a very different kind of subject to the subject of liberal culture, leaving the latter to withdraw to centres of privilege and heritage sites. As with other state institutions, the ‘privatization’ of Universities has been steadily achieved through the introduction of internal markets and mechanisms such as KPIs and PRP that formally assume a subject of pure self-interest that needs to be governed by the imposition of goals and targets that are continually assessed in the running commentary of internal audit, the latter having no external rationale or reference other than the economic efficiency or ‘value for money’ that is calculated on the basis of the same imaginary interests. This process reinforces and locks-in competition as a formal principle. The ultimate biopolitical aim, or effect, is to produce (economic) life according to mathematizable models. In this way governance manufactures the kind of data-producing subjects it wants even as it justifies itself scientifically in the name of economic reason.

Alongside the credence given to Hawking’s and others view that science has rendered philosophy pointless, another symptom of the belief that science bears the burden of truth is the rise of quasi-scientific approaches to the Humanities. And here I do not just mean sociobiology, evolutionary psychology and so on, but the work of a new generation of academics producing varieties of, for example, ‘cognitive literary criticism’ and ‘evolutionary literary theory’ which look ‘to the cognitive neurosciences for finer-grained descriptions of the workings of language, consciousness and subject-formation than those supplied by influential but inadequate post-structuralist theories’ (Richardson, 2007: 553).

But if the idea is to save the Humanities by imitating scientific methods, it is doomed from the start because its object, the manifest image of the conscious, language-defined human being, is itself unscientific. Ever since the post-linguistic turn of the 1980s and the rapid development of cognitive neuroscience, scientists have become increasingly sceptical about the utility and even ‘reality’ of ‘top-down concepts, such as thinking, consciousness, motivation, emotion, and similar terms’, doubting that they ‘can be mapped onto corresponding brain mechanisms with similar boundaries as in our language’ (Buzáki, 2006: 19). The once notorious eliminative materialism of Paul and Patricia Churchland that famously denounced and rejected the ‘folk psychological’ mysticism of conventional concepts ‘such as belief, desire, pain, pleasure, love, hate, joy, fear, suspicion, memory, recognition, anger, sympathy, intention and so forth’ (Churchland, 1998: 3), has become standard. Everything that goes on in the Arts and Humanities is essentially delusional, a tissue of semblance.

At their most provocative, the Churchlands claim not only that the folk psychology model that informs Humanities and Social Science is empirically false, but it is also damaging, chronically defective (12). Cognitive neuroscience knows very well that brains are not simply hard-wired, but need to develop. They must become subject to processes of learning in order to function appropriately and efficiently. Trillions of new synaptic connections need to be made between neurons ‘so that incoming sensory vectors are automatically and almost instantaneously transformed into appropriate “prototype” vectors at the higher populations of cortical neurons’ (14). This is ‘learning’. What learning is not, however, is ‘assembling a vast mass of sentences’ because the ‘basic unit of occurrent cognition is not language-based, but rather the high-dimensional neuronal activation vector (that is, a pattern of excitation levels across a large population of neurons)’. And ‘the basic unit of cognitive processing is apparently not the inference from sentence to sentence, but rather the synapse-induced transformation of large activation vectors into other such vectors’ (10). Since human languages are pre-eminently the accumulated archive of ancient folk psychologies, superstitions, misconceptions, misperceptions, myth, narratives reproducing basic cognitive errors, they are hopeless vehicles for learning, incapable of producing appropriate neuronal activation vectors and need to be eliminated. Folk psychology is simply bad theory that results in the bad human behaviour we see all around us and should be replaced by a theory based in the grey matter of the brain, an eliminative materialist ‘successor theory’ (35). The excitement of the Churchlands concerns their promise of a ‘superior social practice’ that will come with the displacement of FP by a theory based in a properly scientific account of ‘human cognition and mental activity’ (35). The disappointment is always that their social imagining falls back on a kind of liberal pragmatism expressing a pious hope that ‘a deeper understanding of the springs of human behaviour may thus permit a deeper level of cognitive interaction, moral insight, and mutual care’ (35), without explaining why the former should imply the latter. As Freud might have noted, one could just as well recoil in horror.

It is not, I would think, in the direction of moral pragmatism that the utopia promised by the faith in science lies. Far from diverting the techno-scientific drive, the financial crisis of 2008 has of course further entrenched the attempt by the forces of neoliberal governance to account for and speculate upon the economic effects of human cognitive processes both individual and collective. The hope is that the market mechanism can be enhanced through the elimination of irrational human impulses (greed, fear, panic etc.) that are based on the manifest image of human motives and behaviour based in language. Rather, through being reconstituted within the conceptual framework of completed neuroscience, economic theories can become much more powerful and more substantially integrated within physical science generally. The promise appeals to the demand for increased economic performance, as brains directly interact with each other via screens and scanners for the satisfaction of the numbers.

Given that consciousness is now regarded as too ‘top-down’ a concept to be scientifically operative and too inefficient in matters of optimal performance (as sports people know, the ‘zombie’ brain is the key to high achievement, Ramachandran, 2005: 83), there would not seem much potential for an unconscious, political or otherwise. For psychoanalysis, of course, the unconscious is the seat of truth, at least insofar as it articulates the truth that the subject doesn’t know that it knows. ‘“I, truth, speak ...”’, wrote Lacan, evoking ‘the unnameable thing that, by virtue of its ability to pronounce these words, would go right to the being of language – if we are to hear them as they are to be pronounced: in horror’ (Lacan, 2006: 736). The unconscious can no longer be defined simply against the (self) consciousness of speaking beings, but also the functional nonconsciousness calculated by numbers. ‘I, truth, speak’, but the prosopopeia now addresses a prosopagnosia that can no longer perceive in a face anything other than an abstract form correlated to the oscillations of neuronal assemblies that might be mapped onto ever-shifting profiles, markers of nodal points of data predicated on an empty mediating space for the exchange of biometric and economic information. Truth shimmers in every upgrade of Facebook ...

While the stream of numbers slide over the real, or the ‘noumenon that, for as long as pure reason can remember, has always kept its mouth shut’ (Lacan, 737), those speaking beings still on the language side of things might ask: what numberless horror is produced or encountered in the slippage, the something of the one (1+) that foams in excess of formulae? Fortunately, it seems, while the noumenon does not speak, it bites, or at least according to some, even as its fangs hook into the ‘technocosm’.

The Browne Report’s indifference to the fate of Arts and Humanities relative to the economic imperative demanded of Science and Technology is something I assume that Nick Land and his acolytes are gleefully cheering in technoecstasy. ‘We no longer judge such technical developments from without, we no longer judge at all, we function: machined/ machining in eccentric orbits about the technocosm. Humanity recedes like a loathsome dream’. (Land, 1992: 223). LOL.

References
György Buzáki (2006), Rhythms of the Brain OUP.
Patricia & Paul Churchland (1998), On the Contrary, MIT.
Jacques Lacan (2006), Écrits, Norton.
Nick Land (1992), ‘Circuitries’, PLI, 217-235.
Sylvia Nasar (2001), A Beautiful Mind, Touchstone.
V.S. Ramachandran (2005), Phantoms in the Brain. Harper Collins.
Alan Richardson (2007), Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide, OUP.