Which materialism? Questioning the matrix of psychology,neurology,psychoanalysis,and ideology critique

The neuropsy-sciences: Materiality and the virtual (re)turn

Let us start with the observation that in the psy-sciences the neurological turn is perhaps more difficult to comply with than as first thought. The crucial question is: can one really leave behind psychology, trading it in for tangible neuroelectric or neurochemical processes? Do we not have, in fact, in the neurosciences a recurring but unacknowledged return to the psychological paradigm? In today’s psy-sciences psychological signifiers (emotions, self-realisation, social relations, etc.) are substituted with purportedly purely neurological ones (serotonin or oxytocin levels). However, does closer inspection not reveal that in order to make sense of the serotonin or oxytocin levels the neurosciences patently draw upon “pre-neurological” psychology? Consider Jaak Panksepp’s (2005) taxonomy of the “emotional systems of the mammalian brain,” in which he identifies four emotions systems (seeking, panic, rage, and fear) in conjunction with, in mammals, three additional systems (lust, care, and play). Is this not mapping psychology onto the brain charts? It appears, then, that the generally acknowledged, pre-investigatory assumptions which incontrovertibly shape the outcome of neurological research are above all informed by psychology. Psychology caters for the first term (altruism, love, violence) for which the neurosciences seek to establish the material basis. In order to devise triggers for fMRI-research on aggression, a certain psychological theory of aggression is indispensable. Does this not lead to loopings and tautologies? Indeed, tracing the references of neurological research back to psychological authors, one almost invariably finds that the latter ground their theories through reference to neurological research! ¹

Also, in clinical praxes the neurological turn is in another sense a tributary to the psychological discourse; for if psychology is inextricably bound to psychologisation and psycho-education, inviting the lay person to adopt the gaze of the expert (De Vos, 2012), then it appears similarly that neurology is inevitably connected to neurologisation and neuro-education. Consider the basic message of ADHD, autism, and the like: it is the biology, it is not about psychology! And this is taught verbatim to both the sufferer and his or her environment. Invariably this concerns a theoretical dissemination: what you suffer from is called … . Parents and children are therefore instructed in the basics of neuropsychology. As neurology remains structurally intertwined with psychology, it is thus inevitably marked by the mechanisms of psychologisation.

Hence, one radical critique might be that the neurosciences do not realise their claim of materialism. It is not about neurological research becoming psychologised in a secondary movement; neurology is always already psychologised. The problem is not that the neurosciences effect a complete reduction of the mind to the material; rather, the issue is that they fail in doing so. This is why in our squared matrix the two terms of neurology and psychology constitute a problematic pair: their seemingly natural and logical alliance becomes impossible and unworkable as the two terms are always on the verge of collapsing into one another.

It is precisely here that materiality flips over to virtuality. For is it not paradoxical that at the same moment that contemporary intellectual doxa seeks to reduce all that is human to the material realm—it’s not psychological, it is about genes and brain matter—our lives are increasingly being mediated or, better still, taking place in a virtual, immaterial environment? Or, phrased otherwise: at the precise juncture that the human is reduced down to chemistry, biology, and even quantum mechanics, subjectivity has concomitantly become a matter of moving through the a-material virtual life-world of Facebook, Twitter, online-gaming, avatar worlds, e-communities, and so on.

Apart from these phenomena, the virtual dimension already rears its head in the actual materialist theories themselves. From a neurophenomenological perspective, for example, Francisco Varela explicitly links “self” to “virtual identity.” From the notion of emergence (which designates how self-organisation at a certain level gives rises to a new ontological level) follows that “de facto life is something in excess, a way of being in nature which is not substantial but is, so to speak, virtual—efficacious but virtual” (Varela & Benvenuto, 2002). Stressing the material base of subjectivity, and evoking the brain as its direct seat, thus rapidly opens up to the virtual. Just consider the brain in vat-thought experiment and its premise of a brain in a vat connected to a computer, letting “you” ² believe that you are embodied and living in a real world (see Dennett, 1978; Putnam, 1981). One can moreover observe how in the virtual realm one can readily retrace the influence of the (neuro)psychological theories. As Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, says literally:

I think that that’s one of the core insights that we try to apply to developing Facebook. What [people are] really interested in is what’s going on with the people they care about. It’s all about giving people the tools and controls that they need to be comfortable sharing the information that they want. If you do that, you create a very valuable service. It’s as much psychology and sociology as it is technology. (Larson, 2011)

Put simply: Facebook, rather than being informative for (neuro)psychology is, above all, informed by (neuro)psychology. In this way, invoking Foucault’s (1978) view of psychology as a technology of the human, cyberspace can be considered the quintessential application of psy-technology. William Bricken’s notion that “psychology is the physics of virtual reality” (Bricken, 1991; i.e., psychology is a key tool to build realistic virtual worlds) should be reversed: as (neuro)psychology has become a hegemonic discourse shaping a whole array of domains (education, media, politics, economy, etc.), it has become the physics of reality itself, thus, ultimately, turning the latter into a virtualised reality.

Furthermore, one can argue that this virtualisation is always already operative at the basic paradigmatic level of the neuropsy-sciences: that is, in the aforementioned processes of psychologisation and neurologisation, which are inseparably and structurally linked to these sciences. Consider how the neuropsy-discourses rely on a kind of Althusserian interpellation. Their “look, this is what you are,” gives form to subjectivity by allegedly revealing the real material base: “look, this is what you are, just look at the brain scans and the gene charts.” Fleshing out the homo neuropsychologicus you are said to be, the neuropsy-sciences create a virtual self, a kind of avatar, redoubling your life if not completely taking it over, making you in a way absent. This creates the modern epistemological/ontological gap within subjectivity: you are called upon to behold a scientific image of yourself. This ultimately means that the human being is detached from itself or, in Derridean terminology, “tele” (Derrida, Stiegler, & Bajorek, 2002) from the homo (neuro)psychologicus it is said to be. Of course, this virtuality should not be connected solely to the psy-sciences and modernity—it is in a broader sense connected to the human being dwelling in language. As Marc De Kesel argues, the subject as a speaking being is that which always eludes itself: the human speaking being was thus always “tele” from itself (De Kesel, 2010, p. 115). However, in modernity, and especially in late modernity, the neuropsy-sciences have become integral to processes of virtualisation, precisely, yet paradoxically, by locating human subjectivity within the supposedly hard materiality of the brain. The interpellation—“look, this is what you are, just look at the brain scans and the gene charts”—positions the neurologised/psychologised subject vis-à-vis its own pseudo-concrete, virtual double.

The question now, apropos the couplet psychology and neurology being ridden by the materialist–virtual paradox, is whether a psychoanalytic materialistic perspective can offer a way out?

Psychoanalysis: Back to the matter?

Is psychoanalysis the privileged third party capable of providing some clarity as to how one can truly be a materialist today? Considering the tautological risk in the alliance between neurology and psychology, psychoanalysis could perhaps claim to be in a position to offer an alternative research base for neurology, drawing on its own independent epistemology. Or, more controversially: as valuable, exciting, and relevant as neurological research is for anyone involved in the praxis or theory of the humanities, it requires psychoanalysis to save it from a psychology always at risk of being lost in the mirages of psychologisation and, more recently, neuropsychologisation. However, who has to save whom here? For, more often than not, neurological research is used precisely as an argument against psychoanalysis. This, in turn, incites strands within psychoanalysis to claim exactly the opposite: it is only with the advent of brain scans that Freud or Lacan has finally been proven right. Be that as it may, if Lacan himself opines that psychoanalysis is most probably not here to stay, then instead of relying on neurology to save psychoanalysis, we should try to grasp what its withering away—or perhaps the withering away of its eternal recurring—actually means, rather than leave the theorisation of its end to psychologists or neurologists. As should be apparent, such a project must involve a radical repositioning of psychoanalysis vis-à-vis materialism.

To propose one such form this repositioning could take, I will engage with Adrian Johnston’s project of “transcendental materialism,” developed for the most part via a critical dialogue with the corpus of Slavoj Žižek. Johnston’s reconfiguration of the relation between psychoanalysis and the neurosciences is enticing and challenging in equal respects, setting his work apart from similar projects. Johnston’s central claim concerns the aforementioned “saving” theme: for Johnston, on the one hand, the neurosciences could supplement “Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis with a naturalist/biological account” and, on the other, psychoanalysis could supplement the neurosciences “with a rich, sophisticated metapsychological theory of subjects whose geneses, although tied to brains, involve much more than bare anatomy and biology” (Johnston, 2009, p. 32). But can psychoanalysis really put forward its usability, as Johnston suggests? Indeed, if this is not self-evident even at the level of the psychoanalytic cure, then readily promulgating such a claim in relation to neurological research is problematic. Put simply: fMRI-research on empathy and altruism will easily draw upon mainstream psychological theories: indeed, a straightforward developmental perspective or a cognitivist, evolutionary approach seem tailor made for experimentation. By comparison, Žižek’s (2004, p. 213) revaluation of Kierkegaard’s interpretation of “love thy neighbour”—i.e., the only good neighbour is a dead neighbour—is considerably harder to put under the scanner.

Quite apart from this issue of the (im)possibility of translating the Freudian skandalons (the death drive, polymorph perverse sexuality, the unconscious, etc.) into operative experimental conditions, the key question concerns: what becomes of psychoanalysis as it enters the strategic rooms of neurological research? Let us hereto consider Johnston’s discussion of the neuropsychological affect theory of Jaak Panksepp. On the one hand, he criticises Panksepp for his “spontaneous Kantianism,” presupposing pure instinctual emotions as “thinkable-yet-unknowable noumenal things-in-themselves” existing beyond the epistemologically accessible affective phenomena. To which Johnston opposes Hegelian philosophy and Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalytic meta-psychology, as these attest to a “thoroughgoing dialectical digestion of the natural by the more-than-natural” (Johnston, 2009, p. 11). This approach allows us, for Johnston at least, to avoid the postulation of a noumenal or natural core in human emotions. However, defending Panksepp, Johnston adds that instinctual emotions should be understood as affective expressions arising in exceptional circumstances where the primal constituents of human bodily being come to light in their undiluted immediacy. For Johnston, it is precisely psychoanalytic and socio-political considerations which can account for such circumstances, which he describes as:

brutal ordeals and overwhelming traumas as excessive “limit experiences” violently unleashing unprocessed corporeal intensities pitilessly reducing those who suffer these experiences to the dehumanized state of naked animality, of convulsing, writhing flesh. (Johnston, 2009, p. 12)

However, does this not mean that in certain circumstances the unmediated noumenal does lay itself bare, with psychoanalysis serving as one of the foremost tools for making sense of it? By talking of “convulsing, writhing flesh,” is Johnston not presupposing, beyond Hegelian dialectics, a basal unmediated natural core of the psyche? Psychoanalysis here seems to become a usable trauma-psychology, a device for experimentation and scanning. Hence, just as the dyad of neurology/psychology is susceptible to collapsing and becoming unworkable, neither is psychoanalysis playing the ministering knight necessarily a viable solution, as it is here that psychoanalysis threatens to dissolve into the psy-sciences by becoming a psychology; the psychology, of the noumenal—with flesh and trauma as the central references. Hence, despite the perspicaciousness of Johnston’s attempt to make sense of the current developments in psychoanalysis, neurology, and ideology critique, Johnston nonetheless risks falling prey to psychologisation. For example, in his attempt to link contemporary neurological research on affect and emotion with psychoanalysis, he bypasses the aforementioned top-heavy heritage of the psy-sciences in these neurological approaches to emotions. This leads him to accept the anti-Freudian notion of “unconscious affects” bringing him ever closer to the psychologising neutralisation of the Freudian skandalon par excellence: the watering down of the unconscious into a subconscious, conceived as the virtual reservoir of non- or subconscious thoughts and feelings. However, the unconscious, certainly in a Lacanian reading, does not constitute a parallel, positive in-depth psychological reality but, rather, a profound negativity structurally pre-supposed at the surface of discourse, which accompanies, colours, and, above all, thwarts each conscious manifestation of thought or feelings.

One could argue that Johnston, with his dramatic and pictorial account of convulsing and writhing flesh—in an almost Hieronymus Bosch-style—evokes above all the virtual and the Imaginary, as opposed to the realm of matter and the Real. This turn to the flesh and trauma, shared by others such as Cathérine Malabou—e.g., her book Les nouveaux blessés (The New Wounded, 2007)—is at the least questionable: as if somehow in our late-modern urban world a physical trauma is lurking just around the corner. ³ Comparisons can be drawn with the survival guides teaching the 21st-century city dweller tips and tricks in the event he or she encounters an alligator. Does the fantasmatic realm of trauma, and the concomitant convulsing, writhing flesh, not also serve as the basis for Hollywood disaster movies and their predilection for showing raw and unmediated life? Brutal ordeals, fight or flight, adrenaline pumping through the veins, dilated pupils, increased blood supply to the heart and the skeletal muscles: do we not all know the neurophysiology and neuropsychology of real palpitating life?

As such, the epistemological stance of understanding the so-called normal and regular via the abnormal and irregular is not alien to psychoanalysis; quite the contrary, it is one of its fundaments. However, the question in this respect is whether it is really the bump on the head or the brain lesion which is to be considered as the via regia to knowledge about the human. Looking upon everything that can go wrong or lead to deadlocks in one’s life, or considering today’s calamities at a social, economic, or financial level, it is evident that there are more suitable candidates than the bump on the head through which to analyse the normal via the symptomatic. The basis of brain damage appears too restrictedly narrow to be elevated to the central point of reference for understanding the subjective, the social, and the cultural. If only for the fact that it is here that the three terms of psychology, neurology, and psychoanalysis are at risk of collapsing and merging into each other, some caution is warranted.

To conclude, the question of how psychoanalysis can be more materialist is not put to rest by connecting it to neurology. Not only is psychoanalysis at the verge of becoming a psychology there—specifically, a form of trauma-psychology—but it also risks getting caught in a virtualisation; that is, getting caught in the imaginary mirages of the brain-man with its natural and instinctive affections rising out of his convulsive flesh. Let us henceforth return to that other term in our squared matrix: ideology critique, to evaluate whether it is the term which can resist the turbulences of the materialist–virtual vortex, as well as guaranteeing that the other terms within the matrix remain in place and do not collapse into each other.

Ideology critique and virtual political economy

Let us begin by immediately problematising any presuppositions that ideology critique will offer us either the final stabilisation of the matrix, or a ready solution to the question of how to be a materialist today. Even the most cursory of glances at contemporary political economy would observe that there has been a marked shift in terms of the partition of the material and the virtual. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri posit, post-Fordist production is no longer aimed at the production of concrete and material goods but, rather, at the direct production of relationships and ultimately social life itself (Hardt & Negri, 2004, p. 109). This does not mean that tangible products do not matter anymore, only that they play a secondary role in the primordial production of subjectivity and social relations. According to Hardt and Negri (2000), within globalisation, the hegemony of productivity, wealth, and the creation of social surpluses takes the form of cooperative interactivity through linguistic, communicational, and affective networks. Hence, if in fact post-Fordism is concerned with the direct production of subjectivity and social relations, are the media thus justified in framing a financial crisis in terms of the nervosity and volatility of the markets, or to speak of the manic-depressive trader? Even in a serious Cambridge study the levels of cortisol and testosterone on the trading floor in the City of London were assessed (Coates & Herbert, 2008). Both the media coverage and the cortisol study testify to how the hegemony of immaterial production and the virtualisation of economy seems to lead linea recta to psychologisation and neurologisation, ⁴ trading an economico-political analysis for a neuropsychological one.

Here the material–virtual vortex again rears its head, as ideology critique cannot be the strong holder, the terms of the matrix collapse once again into each other. Just consider how in late-capitalism, in conjunction with the concomitant de-politicisation, ideology has become an almost obsolete term. That is, even politics itself has been cleansed of the political factor, reduced to so-called good governance. Not only has political idealism become outdated, then, but, on the whole, politics leaves the decisions that matter to the purview of the market, restraining itself to administrative micro-management. On the one hand, the neuropsy-sciences serve as a tool to render these opaque workings of global economy intelligible by personifying and (neuro)psychologising them. But, on the other hand, the role of the neuropsy-sciences is far more primordial: that is, it is important to grasp that it is here where biopolitics, as the “administration of bodies and the calculated management of life” (Foucault, 1978, p. 140), takes the form of psycho- and neuro-politics. If the birth of psychology is unmistakably linked to the advent of biopolitics, then it is clear that in late-modernity, where production primarily concerns subjectivity and social relations, the psy-sciences take centre-stage: biopolitics becomes neuro-psycho-politics.

Of course, Johnston is right when he admonishes us for a hasty conflation of biological science with biologistic ideology (Johnston, 2011, in press); indeed, neuroscientists themselves often criticise the popularisations and misuse of neuroscience (e.g., O’Connor, Rees, & Joffe, 2012). However, besides the fact that one can question whether an ideology-free biology even truly exists, it is also crucial to understand in its own right that the hegemonic models in the crucial societal fields (education, welfare, social policy) undoubtedly have a strong biologistic penchant, in turn making them very serviceable for today’s biopolitics. One need only consider the biologistic background to discourses on ADHD, autism, or bipolar disorders, and how in the relative space of a few decades these have thoroughly reshaped praxes in education, schools, and welfare institutions.

As such, my contention is that psychoanalysis, precisely as it traditionally refused to be reduced to a psychology, has the potentiality to form the basis of a radical critique of today’s neuro-psychopolitics—albeit this is not a straightforward or unproblematic issue. Let us return to the privileged relation of psychoanalysis to ideology critique. Even though Freud himself was careful not to tread on overtly political grounds, his writings on culture and religion have had a profound influence on political thinking. Psychoanalysis, it could be argued, revealed how the modern subject was essentially a psycho-political subject: as the subject of its drives, the modern human is always already connected via the libidinal component to the broader community (e.g., Lacan’s formulation of desire as desire of the Other). One author who formulated this succinctly was the historian Christopher Lasch, precisely in his seminal critique of so-called therapeutic culture. Lasch can be said to have formulated a theory in which subjectivity unites in itself two registers: the psychical and the political (De Vos, 2010b). That is, Lasch’s critique of therapeutic culture centred not on the diversion of attention from social problems to personal ones (i.e., from real issues to false issues), but rather, targeted the obscuring of “the social origins of suffering” (Lasch, 1978, p. 30).

From this, one can surmise that for psychoanalysis, first, the psychical and the political are by no means two separate domains, rather they are fundamentally intertwined. And second, while in therapeutic culture there is an attempt to reduce the psycho-political subject to the psychological individual of mainstream psychology, psychoanalysis, alternatively, will maintain, alongside the intertwinement of the two, the fundamental irreducibility of the two dimensions. This could be understood via the Freudian concept of Spaltung: i.e., the fundamental dividedness of the subject is the split between the political and the psychical. Whilst psychology claims to be able to close this gap with science and expert knowledge, psychoanalysis can only put forward its skandalons. These Freudian non-concepts, such as the unconscious, death drive, polymorphic perversity, etc., far from being scientific notions, ⁵ testify to the fact that the psychical and the political are two sides of the same coin of subjectivity; ultimately, it is impossible to look upon the two faces simultaneously. ⁶ Resultantly, one can argue that, vis-à-vis our squared matrix, psychoanalysis and ideology critique are fundamentally incompatible. If one is compelled, for example, to depart from clinical practice and speak out in political terms, then one enters a field where the “gold” of psychoanalysis loses its value; in other words, the political analysis must then be done again. And mutatis mutandis: politics and ideology critique are not simply to be imported to use in the cabinet; there, similarly, the analysis must be started again.

Is the principal tenet of the interventions proposed by Adrian Johnston and Cathérine Malabou, then, not the supposition that this structural deadlock can be superseded? The position of both is that, first, the brain sciences are capable of re-grounding psychoanalysis within materialism, and, second, that brain theory is the buoyancy device supposed to re-float an ideology critique which has run aground. With respect to the first contention, Cathérine Malabou’s argument is that the Freudian endeavour was above all situated in, and informed by, the biological knowledge of its time. Due to the relatively unadvanced state of biology, however, Freud had to devise his own theory and praxis of the psyche, expressing the wish that one day the two disciplines would come together again. Malabou contends that, given the spectacular advances of the neurosciences, this time has arrived (Malabou, 2007). Although such calls for a second encounter between the disciplines seems justified, the important question concerns how one should imagine this encounter. To begin with, one cannot contend that the two disciplines parted ways merely to develop in splendid isolation. As aforementioned, the neurosciences are fundamentally and structurally—although not always openly—linked to the broader psy-sciences. Moreover, if one is willing to agree that mainstream psychology is always in one way or another an answer to Freudian psychoanalysis—Freud’s theory was inaugural and thus every psy-theory thereafter must either refute, amend, or simply ignore psychoanalysis—then one cannot but conclude, then, that the neurosciences are also in an important sense affected by both the Freudianisms and the anti-Freudianisms (and everything between those two). Such a concession immediately complicates calls for a second rendezvous between psychoanalysis and the neurobiological sciences. Indeed, it would be illusory to think that today’s neurology constitutes for psychoanalysis a virginal and pristine partner. It is for this precise reason that if psychoanalysis thinks she is in a position to save the neurosciences from “bad psychology,” then she is unwittingly drawing herself into an unavowed psychologising discourse.

It is, moreover, precisely there that psychoanalysis loses her potential radicality as a resource for critical theory and ideology critique. To put it in Foucaultian–Agambian terms: there where psychoanalysis claims to connect to the natural and the convulsing flesh, she claims to speak from the position of life itself and, grasping human life as bare life, she risks reproducing the very stance of biopolitics. At the least, Johnston and Malabou’s elevation of brain theory into the core of ideology critique is highly problematic. For example, it is Malabou’s final contention that the emancipatory potential of the so-called plasticity of the brain gets expropriated by mainstream ideology via reconfiguring it as flexibility. And, looking at contemporary political and emancipatory struggles, flexibility is undoubtedly an important issue—consider, in this regard, the signifier “flexicurity.” However, should we not also maintain that behind this discourse lurks the older, more basic theme of the expropriation of the commons which, in actual fact, is what is ultimately at stake? If we focus upon the flexicurity-discourse in Germany in the opening decades of the second millennium, for example, what should actually be denounced is the exploitation of cheap labour, the maintenance of a financial hegemony, the exportation of surpluses to the periphery of the EU leading to a debt crisis in those countries. As said earlier, we do not exactly require the detour of the bump on the head here.

To conclude this section, the critical issue for psychoanalysis, then, is not to claim to be able to offer, in Johnston’s words, “a rich, sophisticated meta-psychological theory” usable for the other terms in the matrix (psychology, neurology, or ideology critique) but, rather, to make explicit the very impossibility of such a multi-employable meta-psychology. Is it not here in this gap, in this very structural impossibility, that we should attempt to develop a truly materialist account, one, moreover, which could serve as an alternative starting point for ideology critique? As such, I think that Adrian Johnston is correct in his assertion that presently psychoanalysis is solicited concerning its claim to be a materialist theory. For Johnston, psychoanalysis should renounce any anti-naturalist materialism; he writes: “a materialism entirely divorced from the natural sciences … is materialist in name only” (2009, p. 32). The crucial question, however, concerns what to offer as an alternative to this divorce, a marriage de raison? Should we not once again place a wager on the very impossibility of the liaison—remember the words of Lacan: il n’y a pas de relation sexuel? Hence, which materialism, then, for psychoanalysis?

A decentred materialism and a critique of psychical economy

Johnston sees the reconciliation of psychoanalysis with the neurosciences as a dialectical process, one which would eventually lead to a general revision of the materiality of the human and the body. But is it not at this precise point that he threatens to lose sight of the specificity of a psychoanalytic approach to materiality? Psychoanalytic materialism, I claim, concerns a decentred materialism: that is, not the materiality of the convulsing flesh, but the materiality of the Real or, more specifically, of the Lacanian objet a. The very fact that this constitutes a fundamental breach with psychology and the neurosciences remains unaddressed in Johnston’s analysis.

Let us explore the precise nature of this breach in more detail. Materiality in the psy-sciences seems to be, as aforementioned, invariably linked to epistemology. In an attempt to schematise: in the mainstream psy-sciences the object of study—the lay person—is commonly conceived as someone who misunderstands him or herself: that is, through his or her particular folk-psychology or folk-neurology he or she is always in some sense mistaken. We owe such notions, broadly speaking, to the Enlightenment, which produced the idea that the human being has the wrong idea about the world and about him or herself. However, despite the Kantian correction, that Das Ding an sich is not knowable, the ontological ambition to reveal the ultimate nature of the world has never fully been given up. In fact, especially within the psy-sciences, this insatiable drive to reveal the naked human being has remained the driving force. Man, a machine, a sophisticated animal, a function of its selfish genes, a constellation of convulsing writhing flesh …. Here, invariably, some kind of hard materiality appears at the horizon of epistemology. This could be branded with the label of vulgar materialism: the errorful assessments that supposedly characterise the lay person are corrected with something tangible; that is, the lack in knowledge is filled with the material substrate of things, the latter allegedly directly accessible to science.

It is here that psychoanalysis fundamentally differentiates itself from the psy-sciences specifically, and from academia in general. For, even if psychoanalysis also eventually posits a materiality, hers appears in a profoundly different place. Although psychoanalysis starts from the same assumption, that people have the wrong idea about whom or what they are, it does not envision a truth underlying the illusion; rather, it presupposes a truth, and thus a materiality, within these illusions and fantasies themselves. Lacan contends: the subject mistakes itself and this concerns the Real. Appearance, so Lacan continues, is not our enemy, it points to the Real (Lacan, 1962, 07/03/62). Does this not mean that the materialism of psychoanalysis concerns a materialism of the lure (“la leurre”) and of appearances? Consider how Lacan, in respect of this Real, mocked scientists who reduced sexual attraction to albumin and other chemical substances. Along the lines of Freud’s “glance on the nose,” Lacan evokes the duvet (down) on the forearm of a woman: something which could induce a shiver right through another person faced with this pure manifestation of her existence. This, in turn, leads Lacan to say that sexual attraction is about bringing the lure into play: “ce leurre c’est sa réalité même” (this lure is its very reality; Lacan, 1962, 07/03/62). At the very least, we are on totally different ground here to the idea that the lay person is afflicted with a flawed folk-psychology, which the mainstream (neuro)psy-sciences attempt to trace back to the hard wired brain. For psychoanalysis, the “as if” stance not only functions as if it is real, resulting in a performative reality but, as Žižek puts it, the “as if” is the thing itself, “it has an actuality of its own” (Žižek, 2010, p. 285). This means that the idea of free will, for example, is not merely a performative mirage but, rather, because of its illusory status, has a massively operative and hence material weight.

One can note here how psychoanalysis already connects with a certain tradition of ideology critique. Consider, for example, how a Marxist approach involves not an analysis of subjective illusions, but of objective illusions: illusions which ground our reality in the facts. Marx concluded that, if one tries to unearth social realities (money, for example) by stripping them of their mystifying veils, one does not end up eventually with the hard materiality itself, but again with, as he calls it, the metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. The illusions of social reality, such as money and religion, therefore, are objective illusions (Žižek, 2006). At this cross-section of the psychical and the political, therefore, a decentred materialism sees light. Through his elaboration of the psychoanalytic notion of the “subject of the lack,” Žižek can help us to relate this decentred materialism to the Lacanian objet a. Is not Lacan’s basic materialist position that the lack itself has to be sustained by a minimum of material leftover, by a contingent, indivisible remainder which has no positive ontological consistency, but is simply a void embodied? Does not the subject need an irreducible pathological supplement? This is what the formula of fantasy ($ ◊ a, the divided subject coupled with the object-cause of desire) indicates (Žižek, 2003, pp. 152–153).

For psychoanalysis, the subject is the subject of the lack; that is, the subject is never fully equal to itself, it is only constituted discursively via a signifier representing the subject for another signifier. It is at the site of this discursive void that the subject is related to that which, in the phantasmatic sense, embodies or materialises its lack: the objet a as the object-cause of desire. In order to flesh out how in this way the materiality of the subject is decentred by the materiality of the objet a, it is useful to draw upon another passage from Žižek’s work. Žižek points out that the old Catholic strategy to guard men against the temptation of the flesh might miss what is truly at stake in terms of the Real. In this strategy, men were prompted, when in front of a voluptuous feminine body, to imagine how it would look in a couple of decades; or to imagine what lurks now already beneath the skin—raw flesh and bones, inner fluids, half-digested food and excrements:

Far from enacting a return to the Real destined to break the imaginary spell of the body, such a procedure equals the escape from the Real, the Real announcing itself in the seductive appearance of the naked body. (Žižek, 2009, p. 134)

For Žižek, the decaying body is reality, as opposed to the spectral appearance of the sexualised body which is the Real. One takes recourse in the decaying body in order to avoid the deadly fascination of the Real and its threatening vortex of jouissance.

Is this specific approach to the Real, then, not the trait-unaire, or better still, the rabbit hole between, on the one side, psychoanalysis and, on the other, ideology critique? Due to the fact that in post-Fordist societies materiality shifts from concrete commodities to subjectivity and social relations, the challenge today is to account for psychoanalysis’ continued relevance for the critique of ideology: psychoanalysis makes possible a critique of psychical economy.

Conclusions

The main problem with contemporary mainstream neuropsy-sciences is not that they are wrong per se but, rather, that they could become true—if one will allow me to paraphrase Hanna Arendt’s remark about behaviourism (Arendt, 1989, p. 322)—that they do offer, in actual fact, the best possible conceptualisations serviceable for our contemporary biopolitical economy.

At the very least, this means that we should fundamentally reconsider the relation of the subject to “its psychology.” In this respect, one of the most crucial psychoanalytic lessons is, as Lacan posits, that the subject of psychoanalysis is the subject of the sciences. Modern subjectivity cannot be cut loose from the objectivations of science. Simply put, the subject of psychoanalysis is not the subject who responds to albumin or serotonin levels, but the subject who says: “oh my god, is that it?” Or, “is it only that?” Modern subjectivity, then, is situated at the horizon of knowledge of the sciences; it arises as a kind of surplus out of the question, to put it in Agambian terms, what is it to be the subject of one’s own desubjectivation (Agamben, 2002, p. 142)? It is this point that psychoanalysis should refrain from psychologising or filling up; rather, it should apprehend in its radical materiality the decentred materiality of the objet a, as it is understood in the formula of the phantasm as the fundament of the psyche, the object-cause of desire, the motor of the psychical economy.

For psychoanalysis, as such, materialism is not about the “really existing out there,” but instead, as Žižek puts it, about the ontological incompleteness of reality (Žižek, 1999, p. 60). The fundamental rupture or antagonism, then, is not between nature and culture, but that which already thwarts reality as such. Here one can discern a minimal, but nonetheless crucial, difference with Johnston’s work, which also situates an inconsistency in matter, elevating this inconsistency to the very condition of possibility for a more-than-material subjectivity to arise immanently out of a material ground. “Weak nature,” Johnston writes, produces “more-than-natural subjects,” which autonomise themselves of the heteronomous determination of nature (Johnston, 2011, p. 169). Whereas, for Žižek at least, this evokes a third domain, neither-natural-nor-cultural, a non-human and non-natural field which precedes and makes possible the ex nihilo eruption of human subjectivity, Johnston (2011, in press), on the contrary, refuses to understand this as a separate domain, as a realm in its own right. For him the final analysis is nature, albeit “weak nature.” Building upon Žižek’s position, I would situate in this third domain the decentred materiality of psychoanalysis. Indeed, has not the specific approach of psychoanalysis—one which constitutes its very value—always been to transcend the dichotomy of nature and culture in order to open up a different realm for the subject and its object, that is, the subject and its decentred and material correlate? Rejecting this lineage, Johnston has to place all the weight upon the weakness of nature and presuppose a primordial breach in the Real. Is this not, from a Lacanian point of view, however, highly problematic? Is it not only via the symbolic register that nature turns out to be not-All? In that respect, the barring of nature, as Johnston refers to it, should be understood as both primordial and as an effect of the symbolic register. The so-called “Nagträglichkeit,” the après-coup, is a true time-knot: nature’s not-all, then, gives rise to subjectivity and the symbolic only insofar as this not-all is always already the effect of the subjective and the symbolic.

Or, to say it differently: nature has but one problem, it has to be symbolised. Hence, the main problem with Johnston’s foregrounding of the weakness of nature is that it keeps open the possibility that the neurosciences are able to teach us something about subjectivity in a direct and unmediated way. The far more radical conclusion we are forced to confront is that the brain has but one problem, it has to be brought to light by neuroscientists who, in this very act of illumination, subsequently fall back upon psychology, in a perpetual loop which engenders numerous unacknowledged paradoxes and inconsistencies. And, as argued, the addition of psychoanalysis instead does not work, for there the very gold of psychoanalysis turns into something else. The only remaining wager is not to unearth, because it lays at the surface but, rather, to point to the basic non-psychology of modern subjectivity and its decentred materialism. ⁷

This critique of psychical economy could, ultimately, serve both as the basis for psychoanalysis’s radical non-usability for current post-Fordist biopolitics, and as a warning that one should not be all too eager to close the gap between psychoanalysis and both psychology and the neurosciences. For, contra Hardt and Negri’s suggestion that post-Fordism’s direct production of subjectivity and social relations is truly direct and unmediated, I argue that it does not take place in a naturalised vacuum of humankind. On the contrary, the discourses of mediation involved are precisely to be found in the psy- and neurosciences. If, as Brian Massumi contends, the capitalist logic of surplus-value production takes over the relational field, hijacking affect in order to intensify profit potential (Massumi, 2003), then it is clear that the neuropsy-sciences are the tools which make the extracting of this surplus-value possible. In this respect, it is worthwhile recalling Adorno’s seminal critique of astrology in which he argued that the obscure and blindly-accepted logic of the supernatural reflects the “opaqueness and inscrutability” of social life under the capitalism of big concerns (Adorno, 2001). Have current neurologised discourses not replaced astrology, with the neuronal level serving as a new form of blind fate? Consider Malabou’s contention that “the great metaphysical teaching of neurobiology today” is not to consider brain damage as an isolated possibility, rare things that happen in hospitals, but as a constant possibility (Malabou & Vahanian, 2008, p. 9). Or, alternatively, the inhumanness of the brain preferred over the inhumanness of humanity? As such, the neurosciences permanently run the risk of serving as a pseudo-concretisation, attempting to make tangible and manageable today’s virtualised reality; that is, a late-capitalist life-world held under the sway of an immaterialised global economy. Through its attempts to make sense of our antagonism-ridden, seemingly immaterialised First Life, neurologisation thus realises a second virtualisation, a Second Life.

But, of course, the question then becomes: can psychoanalysis’ objet a, and its associated decentred materiality, really provide the basis for alternatives? Should one even not consider the possibility that, historically speaking, psychoanalysis has had a particular, and far from emancipatory, position precisely as the vanishing mediator of the transition from Fordist to post-Fordist production? As psychoanalysis was distorted, negated, and dissolved into the (neuro)psy-sciences it ultimately formed the basis for these sciences to both transmit the rationale of de-materialised post-Fordist production, and to provide the paradigm with the tools of expropriation to cash in the surpluses. Put differently: psychoanalysis’ historical function within the matrix was that of providing Capital with the basic skandalons which, after reification via their incorporation within mainstream (neuro)psy-sciences, became capitalism’s driving force.

Above all else, it is clear that a political emancipatory project cannot evade the psy-question of what is the human. Ideology critique cannot not deal with psychology, neurology, and psychoanalysis, without ever finding in those disciplines the ultimate answers of what constitutes the human. On the other end of the spectrum, those currently operating within the clinical praxis of psychoanalysis itself will inevitably be prompted to assume a political position; and the temptation to resist is to make this political leap via the short-circuit of the neurosciences, as this not only prepares the ground for psychologisation and neurologisation, but also curtails the specific critical potential of psychoanalysis. The neurological turn, then, is a false solution to the parallax of the psy-field and the political field, which undermines any subversive potential of a decentred materialism for both psychoanalysis and critical theory. At the very least, if psychoanalysis is on the verge of disappearing, it should vehemently defend its uselessness qua uselessness.