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От
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Кудинoв Игорь
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Пуденко Сергей
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Дата
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12.02.2006 11:11:09
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Рубрики
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Прочее; В стране и мире;
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я_тебя_запутал_-_pdf'ы_finereader_читает_запросто.
> текст статьи выдран с мясом из pdf-а, наверно концы строк
> отформатированы в нем. ННТП тут не при чем
О! как далеко шагнул прогресс! давай еще
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222
Brian Massurni
unqualified. As such, it is not ownable or recognizable, and
is thus resistent to critique.
It is not that there are no philosophical antecedents to
draw on. It is just that they are not the usual ones for
literary and cultural studies. Spinoza is a formidable
philosophical precursor on many of the points at issue here:
the difference in nature between affect and emotion; the
irreducibly bodily and autonomic nature of affect; affect as
a suspension of action-reaction circuits and linear
temporality in a sink of what might be called 'passion1, to
distinguish it both from passivity and activity; the
equation between affect and effect; the form/content of
conventional discourse as constituting a separate stratum
running counter to the full registering of affect and its
affirmation, its positive developmentj its expression as and
for itself. The title of Spinoza's central work suggests a
designation for the project of thinking affect: Ethics.4
Another story, about the brain: the mystery of the missing
half-second. Experiments were performed on patients who had
been implanted with cortical electrodes for medical
purposes. Mild electrical pulses were administered to the
electrode and also to points on the skin. In either case,
the stimulation was felt only if it lasted more than half a
second: half a second, the minimum perceivable lapse. If the
cortical electrode was fired a half second before the skin
was stimulated, patients reported feeling the skin pulse
first. The researcher speculated that sensation involves a
'backward referral in time' - in omer words, that sensation
is organized recursively before being linearized, before it
is redirected outwardly to take its part in a conscious
chain of actions and reactions. Brain and skin form a
resonating vessel. Stimulation turns inward, is folded into
the body, except that there is no inside for it to be in,
because the body is radically open, absorbing impulses
quicker than they can be perceived, and because the entire
vibratory event is unconscious, out of mind. Its anomaly is
smoothed over retrospectively to fit conscious requirements
of continuity and linear causality.5
What happens during the missing half second? A second
experiment gave some hints.
Brain waves of healthy volunteers were monitored by an
electro encephograph (EEG) machine. The subjects were asked
to flex a finger at a moment of their choosing, and to note
the time of their decision on a clock. The flexes came 0.2
seconds after they clocked the decision. But the EEG machine
registered significant brain activity 0.3 seconds before the
decision. Again, a half second lapse between the
The Autonomy of Affect
223
beginning of a bodily event and its completion in an
outwardly directed, active expression.
Asked to speculate on what implications all this might have
for a doctrine of free will, the researcher, Benjamin Libet,
'proposes that we may exert free will not by initiating
intentions but by vetoing, acceding or otherwise responding
to them after they arise'.6
In other words, the half-second is missed not because it is
empty, but because it is overfull, in excess of the
actually-performed action and of its ascribed meaning. Will
and consciousness are subtractive. They are limitative,
derived functions which reduce a complexity too rich to be
functionally expressed. It should be noted in particular
that during the mysterious half-second, what we think of as
'free', 'higher' functions, such as volition, are apparently
being performed by autonomic, bodily reactions occuring in
the brain but outside consciousness, and between brain and
finger, but prior to action and expression. The formation of
a volition is necessarily accompanied and aided by cognitive
functions. Perhaps the snowman researchers of the first
story couldn't find cognition because they were looking for
it in the wrong place - in the 'mind*, rather than in the
body they were monitoring. Talk of intensity inevitably
raises the objection that such a notion involves an appeal
to a pre-reflexive, romantically raw domain of primitive
experiential richness - the nature in our culture. It is not
that. First, because something happening out of mind in a
body directly absorbing its outside cannot exactly be said
to be experienced. Second, because volition, cognition, and
presumably other 'higher' functions usually presumed to be
in the mind, figured as a mysterious container of mental
entities that is somehow separate from body and brain, are
present and active in that now not-so 'raw' domain.
Reson-ation assumes feedback. 'Higher functions' belonging
to the realm of qualified form/content in which identified,
self-expressive persons interact in conventionalized
action-reaction circuits following a linear time-line, are
fed back into the realm of intensity and recursive
causality. The body doesn't just absorb pulses or discrete
stimulations; it infolds contexts, it infolds volitions and
cognitions that are nothing if not situated. Intensity is
asocial, but not presocial - it includes social elementSj
but mixes them with elements belonging to other levels of
functioning, and combines them according to different logic.
How could this be so? Only if the trace of past actions
including a trace of their contexts were conserved in the
brain and in the flesh, but out of mind and out of body
understood as qualifiable interiorities, active and passive
respectively, directive spirit and dumb matter. Only if past
actions and contexts were conserved and repeated, autonomically